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🪵 The Threshold

The Forge and the Other: How Power, Discourse, and Encounter Cast the Self

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The planner didn’t place 2 of 119 claims into any seed/thread/digression — listed under ‘Unplaced Claims’ below rather than being silently dropped.

Who am I, really? The vault’s answer is systemic and unsettling: there is no “really” behind social fabrication. From Marxist lodgement in un-chosen history to Foucault’s productive power, from African communitarian personhood to deconstructive refusal of stable identity, these claims converge on a single conviction — the self is not a given substance but an effect of relation, exclusion, and discourse. Two counter-currents run beneath the surface: theorists who celebrate the constructed, contingent self as freedom, and critics who warn that construction can freeze into a new cage — essentialism smuggled back in through reified culture, race, the state, and the selfie.

Seed Claims

Chains of Thought

The Self as Social Effect: From Given Essence to Produced Individual

Humans are constituted by their social relations rather than an intrinsic essence opens the line of questioning: the human essence, in the sixth Thesis on Feuerbach, is no abstraction inhering in each single individual but “the ensemble of social relations.” Gramsci reaches for Marx here because he needs a way of denying that there is some given substrate of personhood upon which society then prints its patterns. Because the essence is relational rather than substantive, The question is what produces individuality, not how society acts on individuals follows directly — Mahmood shows how Butler’s break with an older feminist analytic turns on exactly this reordering. The old question, inherited from generations of feminist theory, was how the social acts on the individual; the new one asks what discursive conditions sustain the entire metaphysical edifice of contemporary individuality at all. Notice the shift grammatically encoded in it: “individual” moves from object of a verb to the product of a process whose grammar is not yet specified.

The subject’s unity is an effect of social configuration, not a premise specifies the mechanics of that production. Jameson’s move is to invert Kant’s transcendental deduction: it is not the unity of the world that must be posited on the basis of the unity of the transcendental subject, but the reverse — the coherence or fragmentation of the subject is itself a correlative of the unity or lack of unity of the outside world. This is a genuinely dizzying claim, because it takes the very seat of synthesis, the “I that thinks,” and makes its stability contingent on something outside it. The subject is no mere effect of the object, Jameson concedes, but the subject position is hardly less erroneous to call such an effect. The word “position” does a lot of work here: a position is something you can occupy or fail to occupy, something spatially distributed rather than interior, something assigned.

This is exactly the point where Power produces subjects and desires rather than merely repressing them enters to name what does the assigning. Mahmood’s Foucault reframes power not as domination possessed by sovereign agents but as “a strategic relation of force that permeates life,” and — crucially — as productive of new forms of desires, objects, relations, discourses. The subject does not precede power relations in the form of an individuated consciousness; it is produced by them. This is the pivot from a juridical model of power-toward-the-self (which subtracts, restricts, represses) to a productive model (which generates, proliferates, invents). Once power is in the business of making rather than merely forbidding, the individual ceases to be a preexisting thing that power happens to constrain.

But the production model risks staying abstract — some vague “social construction” ritual. Discipline produces individuality with four characteristics via four techniques gives it concrete purchase. Foucault derives from the disciplined body “an individuality that is endowed with four characteristics: it is cellular… organic… genetic… combinatory,” operated through four great techniques: drawing up tables, prescribing movements, imposing exercises, arranging tactics. Here the production of the subject is no longer metaphorical. To be an individual in this register is to be distributed into cells, sequenced into an organic time, accumulated into genetic depth, and combined into forces. The self is not merely affected by discipline; discipline is what builds the four-walled interior we then mistake for a given. The etymology still glints in the term: individuum, the undivided thing, is here revealed as the endpoint of a process of division, subdivision, and articulation — the individual is precisely the one who has been individuated.

Social formation elements articulate with each other in complex ways broadens the scene from the single body to the formation that surrounds it. Hall’s Althusser reads the Grundrisse for a “theory of articulations between the different elements or levels of a social formation,” explained through overdetermination borrowed from Freud. “Articulate” is a richly double word — to join together, but also to give voice to. The same movement that links the levels of a social formation is the movement by which a subject comes to have a voice at all. This is not a comfortable homeostatic model: overdetermination means each element is the meeting-place of many causal lines, some of which contradict others, so the production of subjectivity is constitutively unstable rather than a clean assembly line.

Why should any of this admit of analysis at all? Ontological analysis applies to constructed entities like the self answers the skeptic. Hallaq insists that “ontological” need not mean pregiven; the self “is a particular formation that may lend itself to an analysis of quiddity, although it is a constructed entity.” Quiddity — quidditas, “whatness” — the scholastic term for the essence in virtue of which a thing is what it is. Hallaq’s provocation is that constructed things still have a whatness, that being-built does not preclude being-quidditively-analyzed; the ontological is “not a stable or fixed ‘natural’ quality, incapable of mutation.” This rescues the whole project from the trap of saying “it’s all constructed, więc nothing can be said of it,” which would be just another way of giving the subject back its pre-discursive innocence.

Individual motives become social only through forms of mutual interaction and The individual’s inner mental relations mirror social relations among persons return us to the micro-level, and here Simmel gives the production a different texture. In themselves, he writes, hunger, love, work, religiosity, technology, intelligence are “not social” — they are the materials filling life, the “immediately concrete loci of all historical reality.” They become social only through the forms of sociation that coordinate them: “sociation” being Simmel’s term for the ongoing, never-finished process of being-with-others, as opposed to any settled social structure. And then the remarkable symmetrical claim: “the conceptions of the single individual, with all their relations of association and dissociation, differentiation, and unification, behave in the same way in which individuals behave in regard to one another.” The inner life is a society of its own parts. The self’s internal conflicts are not private dramas but intrapsychological repetitions of inter-personal pattern. The production of the individual is the production of a miniature social formation inside the skull.

Sociability among equals is an artificial stylized game, not a return to natural self pushes this to its most paradoxical extreme. Simmel’s world of sociability is “the only one in which a democracy of equals is possible without friction,” and it is artificial — “made up of beings who have renounced both the objective and the purely personal features” of life. We mistake sociability’s pleasure for a return to “that which we really are,” a pure human essence stripped of burdens and inequalities. But the reverse is true: what feels most like our natural selves is the most stylized game we play. The “democracy of equals” is not the uncovered ground beneath social distortion but a synthesized aesthetic achievement — equality as an artificial product rather than an original condition.

Here is what becomes visible only by holding these in sequence: the entire tradition — Marx, Foucault, Butler, Althusser, Hallaq, Simmel — keeps promising that the self is produced rather than given, yet every step of the argument must presuppose some residuum that does the producing. Jameson’s subject-position is produced, but “position” implies a space and a body that preexists its placement; Foucault’s disciplined body is assembled, but it is still a body being disciplined rather than conjured; Simmel’s the content of life is explicitly “not social” before sociation gives it form. The production-of-subjectivity thesis, taken to its own conclusion, declares that everything is articulation — and then must smuggle in a raw material of drives, sensations, and bodies for the machinery to work upon. The real achievement of reading these claims through each other is not the discovery that the self is socially produced, which each of them asserts alone, but the discovery that production itself is the unexamined metaphor — that the factory model of subjectivity, complete with its inputs and outputs, may be the last place where a pre-social essence secretly re-enters through the loading dock labeled “raw materials.” The subject is not given but produced, and the production is real — but what the chain keeps the pressure on is whether production can ever be total, or whether every account of making the self is secretly an account of taking something not-self-made and shaping it.

The constructive open question is a genuinely empirical one: Social formation elements articulate with each other in complex ways names overdetermination as the mechanism of articulation, but nothing in this thread specifies what a self looks like when its producing lines genuinely conflict — when the discipline’s cellular grid demands one individuality and the sociability game demands another. Is there a distinct phenomenology of the overdetermined subject, a felt texture of being-multiple that is itself a produced (not merely suffered) state? Looking for testimony of that texture in, say, writers who lived across colonial and metropolitan regimes of self-production, or bilingual subjects whose two self-making apparatuses are not nested but at cross-purposes, would either confirm that the produced self can be stably multiple or reveal that the production metaphor silently assumes a single master apparatus.

Reading these claims in sequence reveals that every account of the socially produced self — from Marx’s ensemble of relations to Foucault’s disciplined body to Simmel’s sociability — must presuppose a raw material it then denies having presupposed: an unsocialized drive, an elementary body, a minimal sensation that preexists the social formation that supposedly constitutes it. The subject is genuinely produced, not given, but “production” itself is the unexamined metaphor — a factory model that lets the pre-social essence creep back in through the loading dock labeled “raw materials.” The tradition’s real ambition, visible only when these texts are set against each other, is not merely to show the self is made but to ask whether the making can be total — and the answer each text secretly refuses is the one its own productive metaphor keeps demanding.

Relational Selfhood: Community, Otherness, and the Constitutive Outside

Identity is constituted through relation to what is other and different from itself opens the whole question: Stuart Hall insists that neither individuals as free-floating entities nor communities as solidaristic wholes occupy the social space on their own. Each is constituted in and through its relation to what is other. This is the founding premise, but note what Hall smuggles in with it — the word “constituted.” Not merely influenced, not shaped, but constituted: the relation to the other is the very substance out of which identity is made, not an external pressure exerted upon a pre-existing thing. The claim is ontological before it is sociological.

Because identity is constituted rather than merely conditioned, Communitarian personhood defines identity through community rather than the Cartesian I follows as the radical working-out of the premise. Communitarian African philosophy grounds individual identity in the community of fellows — explicitly in contrast to “the standard Western Cartesian location of an individual’s identity in the ‘I.’” Where the Cartesian cogito posits a self that exists prior to and independent of any social contact (Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt drains away the world, the body, other minds, and finds the “I” still intact), the communitarian position inverts the priority. The “I” is not the ground but the product.

This inversion is pushed further by In African thought the collective community precedes and grounds individual identity, which makes the move explicit: “the point of departure is not the ‘I’ or even the individual, but the ‘you’ — the collective.” The social subject is “impersonal” — it is the community, the tribe. The individual cannot be realized outside community “even in his personal choices” — otherwise, Tempels’ image runs, he would be “like a fish outside of his own natural element.” The fish is a telling metaphor: the water is not something the fish relates to; the water is the medium in which the fish’s being-a-fish consists. Take the fish out and you have not a fish minus its environment but a dead thing. Identity is not a property the individual possesses and then deploys socially; it is a relation that, severed, annihilates the individual.

The most compressed expression of this comes in Ubuntu personhood defines the self only through communal relation: Desmond Tutu’s umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person through other persons. The redundancy is the point. Personhood has no non-relational base form; the phrase doesn’t say a person becomes a person through others, but that a person is a person through other persons. The copula does the work. This is the ubuntu formulation that traveled globally after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — which is itself worth pausing on, because the TRC was precisely an institutional experiment in whether a society in which identities had been violently constituted against each other (apartheid’s constitutive othering) could reconstitute them through acknowledgment. The slogan and its institutional setting are not coincidentally linked; both assume that who one is cannot be repaired in isolation.

Individual identity is stabilized only within collective cultural networks extends the claim in an unexpected register — Hall, writing about fiction, observes that “typical” is the most provincial adjective in a writer’s vocabulary, signaling that you’re “writing only for those who share your assumptions.” A “typical” schoolgirl in Dar es Salaam is a very different type from one in San Francisco. The point is that even “typification” — the most apparently concrete, characterological version of identity — is not an intrinsic quality but a relational judgment made from within a specific collective network. You cannot write a “typical” character at all without an audience whose cultural grid is already in place; the very act of characterization presupposes the community that provides the type’s coordinates. Fiction is thus a minor laboratory for the same thesis Hall argues elsewhere at the level of politics: identity is never self-authorized, even in the loneliest act of the imagination — the author in the room with the manuscript is still addressing an implicit collective.

Identity forms only within collectivities rooted in historical circumstances — from political psychology, citing Erikson — completes the descent from philosophy into psychological development. Earlier failures of trust, autonomy, initiative, or industry handicap the adolescent’s search for positive identity, leading “in some cases to extreme identity confusion and in others to the formation of a negative identity.” The negative identity is a fascinating species of the general claim: the adolescent who cannot achieve positive identity does not simply fail to acquire one; she forms a negative one, often by embracing exactly what her community forbids. Even negation is relational. Identity, Erikson writes, “is something found not alone but in a collectivity and is rooted in one’s ethnic, national, or family past.” Note that “found,” not “created” — identity is discovered as already given by circumstance, like a room one wakes up in.

Identity is constructed through discourse and dialogic interaction, not self-creation — Hall again — adds the crucial complication to the communitarian picture. Identity is constructed “in and through a dialogic process — in which individuals attempt to develop a sense of their identity in (sometimes conflictual) interaction with identities thrust upon them by others.” Here the communitarian model’s smoothness is broken. The community is not a harmonious backdrop against which a serene identity develops; it is a field of contested, sometimes violent bestowals. Identities are “thrust upon” individuals by others. This introduces a tension the earlier claims did not: if identity is constituted by community, and communities are riven by conflict over what identities people shall bear, then the constitution is not a single act but a struggle.

Linguistics decentered identity by showing subjects are positioned in pre-existing discourse shows what grounds the dialogic claim at the deepest level. Saussure: “Language was there before you.” You can only say something by positioning yourself in the discourse. “The tale tells the teller, the myth tells the myth-maker.” This is the decisive philosophical move — it demolishes the “perfect transparent continuity between our language and something out there which can be called the real.” The subject, on this view, does not speak; it is spoken. The enunciation is “always from some subject who is positioned by and in discourse.” This is the Saussurean turn that Hall identifies as one of the great “decenterings” of the Cartesian subject — alongside Freud’s unconscious and Marx’s material base. What unites them is the same structural insight: the “I” is not the origin of meaning but its destination.

Discourse constructs subject positions that speakers must occupy regardless of belief gives the mechanism teeth. One can produce a discourse without believing it; its coherence “does not depend on whether it issues from one place or from a single speaker.” Yet “every discourse constructs positions from which alone it makes sense. Anyone deploying a discourse must position themselves as if they were the subject of the discourse.” Hall’s example is sharp: we may not believe in the natural superiority of the West, but if we use the discourse of “the West and the Rest,” “we will necessarily” occupy the position of the superior West. This is a profound complication of the communitarian picture. On the ubuntu model, one’s identity is given by one’s actual community. But here, identity is given by whatever discourse one deploys, even against one’s own belief. The subject position is not chosen; it is constructed by the discourse’s internal requirements. One can be a subject of a discourse one despises. This is identity-formation without consent — a dark corollary the earlier, warmer pictures of communal selfhood did not anticipate.

Communities form identity relationally only through encounter with an other returns the frame from the individual to the collective, closing the circle back to Hall’s opening premise. Communities too “create a sense of themselves to and through an other.” The Bhabha-derived formulation: difference is negotiated through “a borderline process that reveals the hybridity of cultural identity.” The boundary between communities “cannot then be assumed as a binary division” — the border is not a line but a zone, a “dangerous and incomplete position where the racial divide is forced to recognize… a shared antagonistic or abject terrain.” The communal self is produced at the same borderline where the individual self is — the encounter with what one is not. There is no inside without an outside, and the outside leaks in: hybridity is the proof that the constitutive boundary is porous.

To which Hountondji’s individual-centered rationality ignores how social institutions shape consciousness offers a final counter-weight. Hountondji, the Benin philosopher who famously attacked Tempels and the whole ethnophilosophy project, is refuted by Dokman because he is “obsessed with classical individual-centred rationality. He does not take into account the ways in which social institutions and social processes structure and restrain individual consciousness, impose and warp judgement, contaminate it with collective representations.” The word “contaminate” is deliberately provocative — Hountondji’s own rationality is a Western import that treats collective representation as impurity. But the deeper point is that any critique of communitarian identity that proceeds from an individual-centered standpoint has already conceded the Cartesian premise the communitarian position denies. You cannot refute “the self is constituted by community” from within the assumption that the isolated rational subject is the unit of analysis; that is like trying to refute the claim that water is the fish’s element by pointing out that the fish, properly understood, is a self-contained creature.

The chain has moved from Hall’s abstract premise, through African communitarian philosophy, into the ubuntu formula, across a detour through fiction, down into developmental psychology, and back up through discourse theory to the borderline constitution of communities. Where it lands is this: the modern philosophical subject — the Cartesian “I” that Descartes found surviving all doubt — was not found but constructed, most effectively by the very discourses that claim merely to describe it. Which raises a question no claim in this chain answers. If the “I” of the cogito is itself a subject position constructed by a specific discourse (Western rationalism), then what would a genuinely non-Euclidean selfhood look like — one that did not merely invert or supplement the “I” with community but refused the “I/we” binary altogether? Hall gestures at the “common horizon” where difference and equality might coexist; ubuntu offers the “we” as ground; discourse theory shows both are positions produced within language. But none of these claims specifies the grammar of a selfhood that is neither individualist nor communitarian but something third. That is the gap the chain reaches for and does not close.

Read together, these claims reveal that the entire debate between the Cartesian “I” and the communitarian “we” is fought on terrain both sides take as given — but the discourse-theoretical claims (Saussure, Hall on subject positions) show that the “I” of the cogito was itself never a discovery but a subject position constructed by a specific discourse. The Cartesian subject and the communitarian subject are not two competing answers to the same question but two positions produced within the same language-game of selfhood — which means the real task is not choosing between individualism and communitarianism but recognizing that “who one is” is always an effect of the discourse one deploys, even when that discourse claims to be the neutral ground of all thinking.

The Discourse Fault Line: Decentered Subjects vs. Unified Consciousness

The fault line runs straight through the center of how we theorize culture, and Stuart Hall draws it with unusual precision. Discourse theory restores a decentered subject while culturalism restores a unified consciousness: where culturalism would correct hyper-structuralism by restoring a unified subject — collective or individual — at the center of “the Structure,” discourse theory instead restores a decentered, contradictory subject, “as a set of positions in language and knowledge, from which culture can appear to be enunciated.” What matters here is the verb. Culturalism restores; discourse theory restores, too — but what it restores is not the subject culturalism lost but a different one entirely, a subject that is not a point but an arrangement. Both camps are trying to put something back that structuralism had taken away; the disagreement is about what the something is.

Because this is fundamentally a disagreement about what the subject is, it inherits an older one. Structuralism decentered individual agency that culturalism treated as authentic — and here the genealogy runs back through Georg Simmel, who insisted that for something like vocation to be possible there must exist “that harmony, whatever its origin, between the structure and development of society, and individual qualities and impulses.” Simmel’s premise — that every personality has a position and function in society to which it is called — is precisely the premise that makes the culturalist subject feel authentic: not free-floating, but harmoniously slotted, finding the form that was always waiting for it. Culturalism preserves this harmony by relocating it from the individual onto the collective. Structuralism, by contrast, read the harmony as an effect of the slot rather than a property of the personality. But here is the trouble that Simmel’s formulation hides: if the harmony between structure and impulse is real regardless of its origin, then who or what originated it decides whether you have an authentic self or a good fit.

Structuralism, in fact, does not merely doubt the harmony — it inverts the entire order of explanation. Structuralism inverts culturalism’s claim by making experience an effect of categories: where culturalism held that categories are expressive vehicles through which a prior, lived experience speaks itself, structuralism holds that experience is the emission of the category system. The individual who feels “called” is, on this reading, the subject-position through which the call gets narrated backward. This is a genuinely unsettling inversion, because it turns the most intimate datum a person has — her own felt experience — into a derivative. It is precisely this abolition that discourse theory refuses, and this is why The discursive perspective reintroduces non-unitary subjectivity that structuralism had abolished cannot be folded into either camp. The decentered subject is not the unified subject’s opposite in the way structuralism’s no-subject was; it is a way of having subjectivity without centering it, of restoring experience to the account without pretending experience is sovereign.

The claim that subjectivity can be simultaneously restored and decentered is obscure until it gets a concrete mechanism, and the mechanism — surprisingly — comes from rocketry. Technical systems shape subjectivity by functioning as discourse networks: in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon renders Pavlovian behaviorism, ballistic mathematics, and corporate cartels as overlapping communication systems, with the V-2 as both weapon and meaning-making apparatus. Friedrich Kittler would later formalize what Pynchon dramatized — the discourse network in which the human is one relay among others, positioned by the system even as she appears to speak through it. The decentered subject is, in this register, the node that knows it is a node. The V-2 is the perfect figure for the whole theoretical move: a weapon that is also a message-bearing technology, indifferent to the intentions of the hand that released it, yet producing meaning at every point of its trajectory.

But why should a subject so thoroughly positioned by systems be capable of anything we’d call agency? Here the chain turns back toward Marx, who lodged subjects inside un-chosen historical practices. Marx decentered identity by lodging subjects inside un-chosen historical practices — this is the crucial move that precedes and enables all the later discourse-theoretical ones, and it is older and more supple than its structuralist descendants. Marx’s decentering does not dissolve the subject into a network the way Kittler’s discourse networks threaten to; it situates the subject inside practices she did not choose but can, in principle, understand and alter. The distinction matters enormously, because it separates two very different kinds of decentering: the one that annihilates the subject (structuralism) and the one that historicizes it (Marx, via discourse theory).

Historicizing rather than dissolving has a specific consequence for how subjectivity gets formed. Subjectivity is formed not by single moments but by accumulated historical sedimentation: Aijaz Ahmad’s reading of Gramsci’s “inventory of traces” insists that a personality is conditioned “not by a specific set of traces but by the whole of its history.” The subject is a weave, an overlap of traces with no single origin and no privileged moment — which makes the decentered subject not an emptiness but an accumulation. The sedimentation model is what rescues the subject from both traps at once: it refuses the structuralist fantasy of a tabula rasa inscribed by the current system, and it refuses the culturalist fantasy of a fixed authentic core. The self is the whole of its history. The inventory is not held in a single conscious gaze — that would return us to the unified consciousness — but it is nonetheless there, layered, active.

This brings up the riddle that has haunted the entire chain: if the subject is a weave of its history and not a center, what makes that weave capable of politicking in the first place? The answer arrives through Marx once more, refracted through contemporary political psychology. Marx’s class-in-itself versus class-for-itself maps onto politicized identity: Jost and Sidanius note that politicized collective identity is what turns a group “of itself” (Klasse an sich) into a group “of and for itself” (Klasse an und für sich). This is the single most precise payoff of the whole theoretical architecture — the shift from being positioned in history to taking a position on history requires the interpretive labor of politicization, not the discovery of an already-present authentic self. The in-itself is the sedimented subject; the for-itself is that same subject turned toward its own conditions. Nothing about the weave guarantees the turn; the turn is a political act.

And here is where the genealogy asserts its priority. Anti-essentialist analysis of race depends on prior anti-essentialism developed through class: the entire apparatus for thinking identity as non-essential — as politically constructed rather than naturally given — was first forged in the analysis of class, and it is only because that anti-essentialist machinery already existed that a non-essentialist analysis of race became thinkable. The politics of the for-itself is not race-neutral; it is class-schooled. This is not to rank oppressions but to acknowledge a genuinely historical debt within theory itself: we would not know how to decenter race without the prior practice of decentering class.

Yet precisely on this front the decentered subject has a blind spot, and the critique comes from an unexpected direction. Structuralist accounts render subalterns passive and erase their agency in sustaining racist ideologies: Duany describes blacks as “subject to” whitening, and the critique mounted against him — that this renders blacks “passive repositories” of ideologies, that power is portrayed as “freefloating and abstracted from actors” — cuts deeper than a mere methodological complaint. It identifies the risk internal to discourse theory itself. If the subject is a set of positions in language, and if ideologies circulate through the network with the indifference of a V-2, then agency evaporates exactly where the analysis needs it most: in the actual actors who sustain and aggressively encourage the ideologies that oppress them. The structuralist subject is so thoroughly positioned that it can no longer be held to account — or credited with complicity. The decentered subject, it turns out, restores subjectivity but not responsibility.

The closing shape of the argument is therefore this: each position in the fault line fails at the point where the next one succeeds. Culturalism’s unified consciousness cannot explain change but can explain meaning. Structuralism’s category-logic can explain reproduction but not transformation, and erases the very experience it set out to explain. The Marxian-historicized, sedimented subject can explain both — but only by making agency contingent on an act of politicization that nothing in the system guarantees. And the decentered subject, finally, supplies the politicized agent but cannot tell us what to do with the fact that that agent is also a bearer of the very ideologies she struggles against. The fault line is not between two stable theories; it is between five different failures, each one a correction of the last.

The thread these claims together produce — the movement from unified consciousness to discourse-network node to sedimented weave to politicized group — suggests a closing insight that no single claim states. The decentered subject was never meant to replace the unified subject as the true description of who we are; it was meant to make responsibility thinkable again after structuralism had made it impossible — but it made responsibility thinkable only at the cost of reintroducing the very complicity that the unified subject could not bear. The subject of discourse theory is not the one who speaks but the one who can be held to account for what speaks through her. And that is a radically different — and far stranger — notion of freedom than either camp imagined.

Reading the fault line as a chain rather than a pair of rival theories reveals that the decentered subject was never designed to replace the unified subject as a truer self-description, but to make responsibility thinkable again after structuralism had made both freedom and complicity impossible. The genuinely radical move is to hold that the positions that speak through us are accumulations of our whole history, and therefore objects of accountability rather than alibis — so that the subject of discourse is not the one who speaks, but the one who can be held to account for what speaks through her.

Othering, Ideology, and the Colonial Forge of the Self

Identity construction is an exercise of power through exclusion establishes the opening premise: every identity is founded on an exclusion, and the “outside” it produces — all the terms the identity is not — is constitutive of its very presence. There is no self that does not first carve a not-self from the world. Because this is so, Ideology defines the self by stigmatising the Other follows almost as a corollary: ideology is the meaning-making machinery that names that constitutive outside, converting the bare fact of not-being-X into the loaded fact of being-Y, the stigmatized, the marginal, the intolerant-edged. The ingroup and the outgroup — the self and the Other — are not two things ideology connects but one act ideology performs.

But there is something stranger in this mechanism than mere domination, and Self-definition through exclusion restores self-respect to atomized individuals names it. Arendt’s insight is that the exclusionary definition of self is not primarily a weapon the strong wield against the weak but a cure administered to the atomized: Nazi propaganda “transformed antisemitism into a principle of self-definition,” giving “atomized, undefinable, unstable and futile individuals” a spurious stability. The genius was to move the exclusion out of the “fluctuations of mere opinion” and into the structure of the self. Identity-by-exclusion, in other words, does not merely express a pre-existing group interest — it manufactures the group, and the self, in the act of defining what both are not. This is the point where the general mechanism reveals its psychological engine.

Now the chain must descend from the abstract to the concrete, and it does so through the colonial forge, because that is where the mechanism became an industry. Colonial order imposed both disciplinary power and the ontology of representation shows that the colonizing process introduced “not only a new disciplinary power but also the novel ontology of representation” — the very framework in which a self can be understood as a mind that represents an outside world to itself. The Orient, refusing “to present itself like an exhibit,” appeared “orderless and without meaning,” and order itself became the colonial gift. Here Arendt’s atomized individual meets the colonized subject: both are constituted as lack — one lacking stable social function, the other lacking order — and both are promised a self through the same exclusionary operation. The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse then shows the result: Orientalism became “a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient” — by making statements about it, “authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.” The constructed Orient does not merely describe an external region; it displaces any actual Orient, so thoroughly that the excluded term of European identity is, quite literally, a fiction the exclusion itself produces.

This is where the chain’s first serious complication enters. If every representation is an exercise of power, then [Foucault-derived critique risks undermining the possibility of cross-cultural understanding entirely]] — this is the charge brought against Said: he has virtually presupposed “that there is no such thing as the understanding of other cultures, that statements or representations can be nothing but exercises of power.” The critique, turned fully on itself, undermines its own ground. But notice the hidden conservatism of this objection, because Foucault overlooked premodern European structures that caused the founders of discursivity cuts deeper: Hallaq argues that Foucault, and thus the whole style of critique descended from him, overlooked “the historical causes (that is, premodern structures) within Europe” that produced the very possibility of the founders of discursivity. The genealogy that treats representation as a timeless trap is itself historically provincial — it reads the Mediterranean’s own contingent invention back onto all of time.

And this is precisely the point where the colonial archive supplies the evidential shock. Pre-Cartesian Mediterranean thought conceived personhood as possessing reason, not a representing mind reveals that the native scholars of the very country Lyautey sought to colonize “did not conceive of the person as possessing a mind in this sense” — not the “strange myth of a separate, non-spatial entity” within which happen the “mental processes” of representation. They conceived of the person as possessing reason, “a power or faculty” for grasping universals amid particulars — a conception that was, Mitchell notes, “the common scholarly conception of personhood throughout the Mediterranean world, going back to Aristotle.” The novel ontology of representation is not universal; it is a historically recent European accomplishment, one whose novelty the colonizing process both depended on and hid. So the Foucault-derived critique is not merely self-undermining in the abstract; it is self-undermining in the very territory the critique claims to diagnose, because it assumes as its critical vocabulary the very conception of the person that colonization imposed.

This is where a genuinely surprising and previously unremarked link appears between Arendt’s atomized subject and Mitchell’s colonized subject: both are produced by the same ontological invasion. The Nazi’s “atomized” masses are people whose connection to self has been severed; the colonized person is one whose very self-conception of personhood is being replaced by “the strange myth” of a representing mind. The exclusionary self-definition Arendt gives Hitler’s propaganda is thus structurally identical to the ontology of representation colonialism imposes — both tell a person that who they are is defined by what they are not. White subjectivity projects self-authorship that others must navigate differently confirms the asymmetry built into this: the “European rise to ascendancy” gives rise to “a fiction of white subjectivity as self-authorship,” while “the rest of the world also wishes to self-author, but we come to modernity differently.” The self-authorship that exclusion supposedly confers is unevenly distributed — a fiction reserved for the colonizer, a different, constrained route (fashion, in Goldberg’s striking example — “on occasion, the technique most available to women”) for everyone else.

The chain’s most subtle turn comes from Sociological categories can smuggle Orientalist assumptions into canonical theory, where Hall shows that the discourse of “the West and the Rest” is still at work in the “conceptual categories, the stark oppositions and the theoretical dualisms of modern sociology” — that Marx’s “Asiatic” mode of production and Weber’s “patrimonial” domination carry Orientalist DNA. The exclusionary mechanism does not stop at the borders of political rhetoric; it penetrates the very analytic tools a critic would use to diagnose it. But reading this claim against Hallaq’s critique produces the deepest irony yet: the very “theoretically dualisms” — including the subject/object split at the heart of the representing mind — are the colonial ontology smuggled into critique as if it were neutral method. Colonial personal letters reveal estrangement from self rather than authentic private selves then shows what happens to the human material inside this system: the letters are not “windows onto the soul” but proof of “what empire conferred” — service, housing, stature, tastes retained — Frans Carl joking about becoming décivilisé, Suze proud of her children’s French “thank-you’s” rather than Malay. Even the colonizer’s private self is not an authentic interiority but a performance of the very categories the empire installed.

What emerges across this chain is that the exclusionary mechanism of identity, which Arendt diagnosed in the Nazi self-definition, which Said and Foucault critiqued in representation, and which Mitchell excavated beneath the novel ontology of representation, cannot be resolved by any critique that operates within the terms of representation itself — because those terms are the wound, not the cure. The self that defines itself by exclusion, whether on the Nazi’s principle of antisemitism, the Orientalist’s corporate institution, or Aristotle’s displaced and forgotten reason, is a self that has swallowed the ontology of the representing mind and calls its own estrangement authenticity.

The closing insight: the critique of othering has been quietly fighting on the colonizer’s ontological ground, treating the “representing mind” as the universal human condition and then despairing that all representation is power. But the colonial archive itself discloses that the excluded Other was not merely a misrepresented object — the exclusion actively replaced a prior conception of personhood (person as possessor of reason, the common Mediterranean inheritance) with the myth of the representing mind. Arendt’s atomized self, the Orientalist’s constructed Orient, Weber’s “patrimonial” domination, the décivilisé letter-writer — these are not separate instances of a common prejudice but iterations of a single ontological displacement. The chain’s real object is not the content of the Other but the metaphysics that makes an Other thinkable at all, and any genuine exit from othering must therefore be a metaphysics, not merely a better representation.

The critique of othering has been fighting on the colonizer’s ontological ground: it takes the “representing mind” for the universal human condition and then despairs that all representation is power. But the colonial archive discloses that exclusion actively replaced a prior Mediterranean conception of personhood — person as possessor of reason, not a representing mind — so the “Other” was never merely misrepresented but ontologically displaced. Arendt’s atomized Nazi subject, the Orientalist’s constructed Orient, the décivilisé letter-writer, and the “patrimonial” categories of Weber’s sociology are not separate instances of prejudice but iterations of a single displacement: the manufacture of a self that mistakes its own estrangement for authenticity. Any genuine exit from othering therefore requires a change in the metaphysics of the person, not merely a truer representation of those excluded.

Race, State, and Reification: When Construction Hardens into a Cage

The thread starts with a premise that seems almost too obvious to need stating, until its consequences unwind: Race is social construction with real material consequences, not biology. Sahar Aziz, borrowing Bonilla-Silva’s vocabulary, insists race is “an organizing principle of social relationships” that shapes both individual identity at the micro level and “all spheres of social life at the macro level.” The claim does double work at once — it dismisses the biological fiction while insisting the construction is not thereby unreal. A construction can be false about biology and entirely true about consequences, the way a forged key is a fiction of origin but a real mechanism of entry. This dual structure is the load-bearing wall, and the rest of the thread is the house built against it.

Because race is a construction that nonetheless organizes everything, it becomes available as a tool — and Race functions as a core structuring technology of neoliberal state formation. David Theo Goldberg pushes the micro/macro claim one register further: race is not merely shaped by the state but is “a key structuring technology not just of modern state formation but also more contemporarily of neoliberalism as the driving condition of late modern capitalist state formation.” Notice the sharpened agency here: race moves from being an organizing principle (something social relations happen to exhibit) to being a technology (something a state deploys, a machine part in the apparatus of domination). A principle describes; a technology builds. This is the pivot on which the whole construction gets weaponized.

What makes a technology of domination work is its invisibility as a technology, and Race naturalizes state power by presenting created social order as given and teleological supplies the mechanism. Goldberg and Solomos describe how race “covers over” the “raw expression of state power”: a power that is “nothing more than created” gets “projected through racial terms as the given order of things, seemingly intractable and so established by natural or teleological law.” This is the alchemy at the heart of hegemony — the substitution of made for given, the sleight-of-hand whereby a contingent historical arrangement takes on the sheen of inevitability. It is precisely because the order was created that it must present itself as natural; construction requires the most strenuous denial of its own constructedness.

The word that names this denial is reification, and it operates on several terrains simultaneously. Reified culture discourse masks underlying ideologies of racial purity and hierarchy. Junaid Rana shows that when “culture” is reified — treated as a bounded, self-evident container — it “cloaks racial ideologies of separation and biological notions of purity” that are fundamentally threatened by miscegenation. Here’s the historical irony worth pausing on: ethnology, the very discipline that supposedly superseded crude biological racism by talking about culture instead, turns out to have been “centrally complicit in constructing the ideological edifice of racial difference and hierarchy.” The apparent retreat from biology into culture was never a retreat — it was a change of uniform. The reified culture discourse gives the purity ideology a more respectable wardrobe while preserving its function.

This is where a genuinely startling continuity emerges. What the reified-culture anthropologists do to entire groups, Essentialist explanations transform social positions into natural and inevitable ones does to individuals — and Rudman’s social-psychological account reveals the payoff of the whole maneuver. Once an explanation exists for why groups occupy various social positions, that explanation “becomes a justification for keeping people ‘in their place.’” And here’s the crux: if the position is inherent, then “the status quo begins to acquire a strong sense of legitimacy and even inevitability.” Compare this to Goldberg’s “natural or teleological law” — the sociologist and the psychologist, working a century apart and in different disciplines, have independently converged on the identical mechanism: explanation naturalizes, naturalization legitimates, legitimation freezes. The essentialist explanation is the load-bearing wall’s load-bearing beam.

The naturalization has a specific temporal quality, though — it fixes identity not just in the present but from birth — and Essentialist identity models treat cultural identity as fixed by birth gives the essentialism its genealogical anchor. Stuart Hall’s account is almost mournful in its precision: cultural identity is “fixed by birth, part of nature, imprinted through kinship and lineage in the genes, constitutive of our innermost selves.” Note what this does to the migrant — it renders the “scattering: the dispersal” a kind of cosmic error, since identity is “impermeable to something as ‘worldly,’ secular, and superficial as temporarily moving one’s place of residence.” Yet Hall ends on the thread’s most radical image: “each dissemination carries with it the promise of the redemptive return.” Even as he diagnoses the essentialist cage, Hall glimpses that the dispersal — the very scattering the essentialist mourns — is where the escape route runs.

Because if identity is pure, intermingling is unreadable — and Pure-identity frameworks cannot grasp cultures defined by intermingling turns the essentialism’s failure into a diagnostic instrument. Michael Sells writes of Bosnia: “Those looking for the essence of culture and language in ethnic, racial, or religious purity will find Bosnia incomprehensible.” But — and this is the tell — “those who see culture as a creative process that by its very nature involves intermingling and creative tension among different elements will treasure” it. The framework’s inadequacy is not neutral; it is a symptom. A place that is the very tissue of crossings becomes illegible to the essentialist lens, and what we study when we study “pure” cultures is often less the culture than the blindness of the method. The failure to comprehend is the most honest evidence available that the category has hardened past its usefulness.

That the category can be refused is demonstrated by Derrida’s self-description as African deliberately resists stable identity. Gil Anidjar’s reading shows Derrida declining “to assert, to identify (himself), not simply, as ‘I’ nor as ‘African’” — the word “comme” hovering impossibly between “like” and “as,” so that “we will be unable to say of which kind, by way of which figuration” he is African. This is the deconstructive countermove: not a counter-identity but a refusal of identity’s grammar itself. Where the essentialist model insists on the noun (“African”), Derrida performs the undecidability of the qualifying clause — the always-open question of sort, figuration, kind that the pure-identity model must foreclose. What Derrida and Bosnia share is that both treat intermingling not as a defect to be explained away but as the constitutive condition to be described faithfully.

But faithful description is not what states do — and Social policy reifies iconic citizen types into fixed subject positions shows the administered version of this same dynamic. In the bureaucrat’s “imagined worlds,” Goldberg and Solomos note, “a cast of citizens occupies the city stage”: the nuclear family, the squatter, the single parent, the key worker, the rioter. Each “becomes reified in social policy and catered for in city plans.” The word to hold onto is catered — the state does not merely recognize these types, it builds cities toward them, so that the reified category and the built environment mutually reinforce one another. The squatter’s flat, the single parent’s tower block, the rioter’s contested street: the reification is poured in concrete. Derrida’s graceful undecidability can neither be housed by such a city nor survive long inside it.

Which brings the thread to its final descent, and the deepest layer of the mechanism: Language’s defining power enforces social structures by silencing alternatives. Zygmunt Bauman, writing about the Holocaust, observes that the “sociologically generated world-picture replicates the accomplishment of societal legislating powers” and then “silences the possibility of articulating alternative visions in whose suppression the accomplishment of such powers consists.” The key move: language’s “defining power” supplements the “differentiating, separating, segregating and suppressing powers lodged in the structure of social domination” — and, critically, “derives its legitimacy and persuasion from that structure.” Now the full architecture is visible. The reified category is not just a description that hardens; it removes alternatives from the sayable. The essentialist explanation doesn’t merely make the status quo look natural — it makes the alternative unpronounceable. Every layer of the thread — the technology, the naturalization, the reified culture, the essentialist psychology, the fixed-by-birth identity, the pure-and-unreadable culture, the bureaucrat’s cast, the defining word — is a particular gate on the same prison, and the gates lock because none of them can be named as gates.

The entire construction, read from end to end, reveals itself as a single continuous operation with a single name, and the name is the one the thread has been circling all along: the naturalization of the made. Culture is reified, identity is fixed from birth, social positions are explained into place, and language deletes the alternatives — because at every level a created order is being presented as given, and the given cannot be revised.

Two gaps in the chain are worth naming as genuinely open questions rather than pretending the thread closes them. First, the central lever of the whole construction — that the made presents itself as the given — is asserted sociologically (Goldberg), psychologically (Rudman), and almost lyrically (Hall, Sells), but nothing in this thread supplies the micromechanics: just what does the presenting? A specific study of how a historical account of, say, the invention of a racial category is cognitively discounted by its recipients — how the insistence “this was made” fails to overturn the felt givenness — would confirm or break the entire chain. (The Derrida and Bosnia cases are hopes, not mechanisms; they show refusal is possible, not how refusal wins.) Second, the thread moves through state, policy, anthropology, and language, but it reaches for a claim about the built environment’s complicity — the “cast of citizens catered for in city plans” implies it — without a source that actually demonstrates how urban form, in bricks and streets, decides for its residents which identities are habitable and binds them to those. Who has shown the squatter’s flat itself teaching the squatter that they are a squatter, for life?

Decolonizing the Inner Life: Struggle, Recovery, and the Risk of Re-Colonization

The whole project of decolonization begins, as Colonial domination is undone first in the colonized subject’s inner life insists, not with the seizure of state power or the redrawing of borders but with a breach in the colonized subject’s own interior — a “victory of the colonized over their old fear and over the atmosphere of despair” that colonialism distills day after day. This is Fanon’s founding insight: because domination maintains itself as much through the incubation of dread as through force, it must be first met where that dread lives, in the inner life. Decolonization must transform inner consciousness as much as social structures follows directly from this, and Césaire makes the two-front claim explicit: you cannot decolonize society without simultaneously decolonizing minds, because the relations between consciousness and reality are “extremely complex” — the inward and outward moves are not sequential but interpenetrating, each front hostage to the other’s completion.

But here the chain hits its first complication, because the inner transformation refuses to obey the timeline that its own leaders propose. Colonized subjectivity rejects temporal deferral of its present struggle shows Fanon’s subject spurning the consoling commonplace — “you’ll change, my boy; it will all pass” — with an insistence that the present struggle “had to take on an aspect of completeness.” The word completeness is doing real work: the colonized inner life cannot be financed on credit, cannot accept its emancipation as an installment plan toward some future arrival. It demands totality now. This is why the recovery that Marginalized subjects must recover suppressed histories as a stage of identity politics describes is not nostalgia but an accounting — a search for roots that turns out to be a discovery of “that other crucial moment which is the recovery of lost histories,” the histories never taught in schools or bound in books, the ones that had to be recovered by hand. Because the present is refused in its deferred, incomplete form, the colonized subject must rebuild a usable past from which a self can stand; you cannot will a future you have no past to stand on.

The recovery is also generative, not just archival. Political struggle generates historically emergent self-recognition of subjects captures how the very act of struggling produces its own subject: a “change of self-recognition, a new process of identification, the emergence into visibility of a new subject” that was “always there, but emerging, historically.” The verb matters — emerging — because the self is not unearthed fully formed like an artifact but brought into visibility by the friction of the struggle itself. Identity is a product of the fight, not its precondition.

This is where the reclaiming of the slur enters, because naming is the most concentrated site of that self-recognition. Reclaiming a slur as a defiant identity label emerges from colonized shame has Césaire recounting how he and his cohort adopted the word nègre precisely because it was shameful — “a term of defiance,” a “reaction of enraged youth” that chose the wound as its banner. There is a beautiful historical irony here that Césaire’s own memory supplies: he wanted the journal called L’Étudiant nègre, and the Antilleans resisted, because they had not yet metabolized the shame into defiance. The gap between Césaire and his own constituents is the gap between an inner breach already made and one still foreclosed. And note the etymology that hovers here — from the Latin niger, “black,” the word had been darkening for centuries in European mouths before it was seized and turned. Reclaiming a slur is a form of taking back the power to name, which is the first power taken by colonizers.

Identity-based actions can reshape political power structures without being intended as political provides the mechanism for why this inward naming matters politically at all: politicized collective identity can be distinguished from merely political repercussions of identity. The distinction, drawn from Jost and Sidanius, is that a group’s explicit motivation to struggle for power is what makes its identity political — but the repercussions can reshape power structures even where the motivation was never explicitly framed as politics. The defiant adoption of nègre was, on the surface, a literary-cultural gesture; it rippled outward as political. The inner breach and the social restructuring are connected by this unintended amplification.

But the chain must now turn on itself, because the very mechanism that liberates in one register colonizes in another. Identity politics in one domain can stabilize oppression in another — Hall’s warning that a transgressive politics in one domain is “constantly sutured and stabilized by reactionary or unexamined politics in another,” that a reach for an essentialized racial identity carries “no guarantee” it will prove “mutually liberating and progressive on all the other dimensions.” The essentialized identity won in the inner breach can become a cage in a second arena — a masculine Blackness that re-entrenches patriarchy, a racial solidarity that launders class domination. Formerly colonized peoples risk adopting the dominating discourse against themselves gives this its most painful concrete form: Césaire names it bovarysme — after Flaubert’s Emma, whose fantasies are borrowed wholesale from cheap novels that were not written for her — and tells of the Martinican pharmacist proud that the judges of the Floral Games of Toulouse “hadn’t even realized that his poems were written by a man of color.” The man rejoices in being read as universal, when universality as the colonizer defines it means being read as white. He has internalized the master’s aesthetic so completely that his erasure feels like victory — a crushing condemnation experienced as pride.

And here is the deepest trap: the very tools of liberation can re-colonize. Negritude-style ethnophilosophy extends neo-colonial ideology through illusory identity — Dokman’s charge, channeling Towa, that Negritude as ethnophilosophy produces an “illusory consciousness” in a cultural identity conceived as different, and that this difference-claim is “an extension of the ideology of neo-colonialism.” The defiant label, once consolidated into a fixed essence, becomes a new prison fitted from the outside: the colonizer, after all, was the one who first invented the essential difference; his categories survive being inverted. Yet The postcolonial describes a world condition rather than a theory or identity insists on a way through: the postcolonial is not an identity to be essentialized or a theory to be brandished but a description of “our contemporary world condition” — summed up as life for those “still acted on by controlling” forces whose legacy outlives formal empire. If the postcolonial is a condition rather than an identity, then the inner breach cannot be secured once and permanently stored; it is an ongoing practice of living inside a wound that is still being acted upon. The completeness Fanon demanded is never finally achieved; the defiance must keep being re-won, or it hardens into the very difference the colonizer always wanted the colonized to be.

The thread closes on a paradox that only its movement makes visible: the colonized subject’s inner life is liberated by claiming an identity, but that identity’s fixed form is precisely what re-opens the wound.

Decolonization of the inner life is caught in a constitutive trap: it must pass through a defiant, essentialized identity (nègre, Negritude, recovered history) to breach the colonizer’s hold on the subject’s own consciousness — yet that fixed identity, once consolidated, becomes the very instrument by which domination re-enters, whether through bovarysme’s borrowed ideals, through identity claims that stabilize oppression in other domains, or through the ontologized difference that neo-colonialism is happy to keep alive. The only exit is to treat the postcolonial, not as a stable identity won once and held, but as a condition to be continually re-negotiated — which means the inner breach Fanon describes is not a completed victory but a permanent, unfinished labor of refusing both the colonizer’s categories and one’s own solidified counters to them.

Categorical Selves: Cognitive Tools, Social Types, and the Modern Self

Social categories function as cognitive tools that position the self comparatively establishes the opening premise: categories are not inert labels but instruments that “segment, classify, and order the social environment,” and in so doing they “create and define the individual’s place in society.” The key move here is the word comparative — categories position the self by marking it as similar to some and different from others, which means the self only becomes legible relationally, against a backdrop of other selves. Because categorization is the engine of self-reference, it follows that the self is not one thing but several, depending on which categories are active. The social self splits into individual, relational, and collective forms, not one continuum makes precisely this move, rejecting the older picture of a single personal-to-social continuum and insisting on three qualitatively different selves. The self divides into personal, relational, and collective layers then fills in the content: the personal self is “how the individual differs from others” and is driven by self-interest; the relational self is “motivated by interdependence with close others”; the collective self is a “depersonalized self” defined by membership in large groups.

There is a productive tension buried in that word “depersonalized,” because Group behavior arises from depersonalized self-representation as interchangeable category exemplars argues that group behavior itself derives from the cognitive moment when individuals “perceive themselves more as the interchangeable exemplars of a social category than as unique personalities.” So the collective self is not simply an added layer on top of the personal one — it is, in a real sense, the temporary erasure of the personal, a standing for the category rather than for the self. This is where the psychology begins to brush against something much older. The notion that a person can stand as a pure exemplar of a category, emptied of personal specificity, is precisely the modern achievement Urban life produced a human type who knows others primarily by category describes: the cosmopolitan, the new kind of human “who was able, as his tribal ancestors were not, to relate to others in the new ways that city living made not only possible but necessary.” The cosmopolitan “gained the capacity for knowing others only categorically.” Notice what Lofland is doing — she treats categorical knowing as a historical acquisition, not a cognitive universal. The very categories social psychology treats as a timeless feature of the mind were, for her, a contingency of urban density.

That historical claim gathers force when set against Ingroup identity salience is historically contingent, not psychologically fixed, which draws on symbolic-politics theory to argue that ingroup identity — say, “whiteness” — is “historically contingent rather than psychologically hard-wired.” Sometimes group norms emphasize it, sometimes not; in the old South it pervaded everything, and there is no reason internal to the psyche why it had to. This is a serious complication of social identity theory’s founding assumption. If the salience of ingroup identity is historically contingent, then the cognitive machinery of categorization is real but its content — which categories matter, how sharply they are bounded, whether they are even available — is supplied by the age and the place. Pre-modern social group conception was centripetal and hierarchical, not horizontal drives the point home from the other direction, showing that pre-modern societies did not even conceive of “social groups” the way we do: their fundamental conceptions were “centripetal and hierarchical, rather than boundary-oriented and horizontal.” The very geometry of belonging differs — vertical ascent toward a divine apex rather than horizontal membership among equals. And The concept of society required new embodied practices to be imaginable shows that even society itself had to be learned — the Pasha’s bafflement at being “ruled over by a peasant” is the confusion of someone for whom hierarchy was embodied and personal, confronting an abstract horizontal crowd that simply did not compute.

This is where the individualist-versus-collectivist finding looks newly strange. Collectivists describe roles while individualists describe group categories reports a robust cross-cultural pattern: collectivists spontaneously generate role identities and relationships, while individualists reach for group or category memberships. But Individualism-collectivism does not cleanly predict social identity use immediately complicates the tidy story, noting the mixed support — some studies find collectivists generating more social identity references, others find U.S. respondents using more. The first finding looks, on its face, like a universal psychological difference; the second reminds us it is fragile and historically mobile. What if the pattern is not “collectivists have more social identity” but “each culture recruits the categorical self differently” — collectivists through the thick texture of roles (relational self), individualists through the abstract pigeonhole of categories (collective self)? That would be consistent with both findings without needing either culture to be categorically purer.

Here Simmel’s contribution becomes the needed gear-shift. Social types can embody an all-dominating orientation to the world has him portraying certain human types — “the man of science, the religious man, the erotic man” — as individuals whose experience is dominated by one of the forms of orientation to the world. And Culture names the forms, not the content, of social relationships gives the fuller framework: “All social forms are defined to some extent in terms of the dimension of interpersonal distance,” some drawing distant people close, others pushing them apart, some organizing vertical and others horizontal distance. The social type, then, is not a passive label the cosmopolitan applies; it is a form — a structurator of nearness and distance — that a person can embody so completely that it becomes their orientation. This is the bridge from sociology to fiction. Individuality emerges from the layering and clash of overlapping social types states it as a craft principle: “every person is typical of many things successively or simultaneously,” and the writer who aims at a single “typical character” produces a caricature. The living character — the living person — is the point where multiple category-exemplifications collide, and individuality is the residue of that collision.

This is the insight the whole chain has been building toward, and it retroactively clarifies the psychology. If the personal self were merely the negation of social categories, then the isolated individualist would be a self without content. But if individuality emerges from the layering and clash of overlapping social types, then the personal self is not the opposite of the categorical self — it is the emergent pattern produced when several categories act on one body at once. The “uniqueness” of the personal self is a uniqueness of composition, not of substance. That is why Creating social roles for the marginalized builds self-esteem and dignity lands where it does: Kendall Bailey’s self-esteem “skyrocketed” not when he escaped categorization but when he acquired a better category — swimmer, Paralympic champion. The categorical self is not something to be transcended; it is something to be outfitted with roles that confer dignity. The therapeutic move is not to strip away categories but to get the right ones, the ones that orient the self toward meaningful distance and closeness.

This whole arc — from the cognitive tool, to the layered self, to the historically contingent category, to the cosmopolitan who knows only categorically, to the social type as pure orientation, to individuality as the clash of types, to dignity as the right category — is a movement from a universal cognitive psychology to a thoroughly historical account of what it means to have a self at all. The cosmopolitan’s categorical knowledge is not a fall from tribal intimacy; it is the enabling condition of individuality in the modern sense. The self is not what remains after categories are subtracted; it is what appears when they overlap on a single body and fail to fully coincide.

The modern self is not the residue left over when social categories are stripped away, but the emergent pattern produced when many categorical exemplars are stacked onto one body at once — an individuality of composition, not of subtraction. The cosmopolitan who knows others only categorically is not de-individuated by that knowledge; rather, it is precisely the multiplicity of overlapping categories that makes modern uniqueness possible, while pre-modern centripetal hierarchy allowed the self no such layering to collide against. This is why the therapeutic and political task is never to escape categorization but to secure better categories — because dignity and selfhood are functions of which forms of orientation the self is permitted to embody, not of its nakedness from them.

The Double Bind of Modern Individualism: Self-Realization vs. Determining Structures

Modern individualism shifted from freedom-as-such to the value of being this specific irreplaceable self marks the opening rift: once the individual is liberated from “the rusty chains of guild, birthright, and church,” the meaning of that freedom quietly mutates. Simmel’s insight is that what now matters is no longer that one is free as such but that one is this specific, irreplaceable, given individual. The chain of being inverts into a chain of selves — but the very ground that makes this possible immediately becomes hostile to it. Both nature’s mechanism and history’s determinism oppress the modern self shows why: the self that has become this specific irreplaceable thing finds itself caught between two deterministic pressures, nature’s mechanism “subjecting the soul to the same blind forces as the falling stone” and history reducing it to “a mere point of intersection of social threads.” The individuality that Simmel prizes is, from its first breath, threatened by the two systems that constitute the modern world.

This is where the argument takes its most uncomfortable turn. Standardized production forces a compensating pretence of individualism demonstrates what happens when the ideal of the irreplaceable self collides with the actual logic of industrial society. Adorno’s image is devastating precisely because of its restraint: the feeling for exchange value “corresponds to the behaviour of the prisoner who loves his cell because he has been left nothing else to love.” When mass production offers the same thing to everybody, the commercial necessity of selling that identity nonetheless demands “the official culture’s pretence of individualism.” The irreplaceable self becomes a produced commodity — which means Adorno has effectively detected a lie at the heart of the freedom Simmel described. The self’s uniqueness is both the highest value and the thing that standardized production structurally cannot deliver.

Note the etymological wrinkle here: “individual” derives from the Latin individuum, “that which cannot be divided” — the atom, the smallest indivisible unit philosophy could imagine. Adorno’s puncture is that modernity mass-produces indivisibility; the singular becomes serial. So the chain now needs to ask whether the modern self has any way out that isn’t either determinism or manufactured uniqueness. This is where the two dominant responses enter, and they pull in opposite directions.

Saba Mahmood’s intervention, via Socially prescribed conduct can serve as scaffolding for self-realization rather than constraint, undercuts the entire Western framing by refusing its premise. The mosque participants she studies “did not regard authorized models of behavior as an external social imposition that constrained the individual.” Rather, socially prescribed conduct was “the ‘scaffolding’ through which the self is realized.” The word “scaffolding” is doing enormous work here — it converts constraint into a structure that enables rather than suppresses. Against Simmel’s and Adorno’s shared assumption that external determination is the enemy of self-realization, Mahmood proposes that some selves are only realized through the very social forms that the autonomy narrative casts as prisons. It is a genuinely foreign claim to the European liberal tradition: the self is not realized in spite of its situation, but through it.

Yet the Eurocentric framing fights back, and does so with enormous explanatory force. Self-identity is now a reflexive project conducted amid abstract systems — Giddens’s phrase — describes the self as an ongoing project (Entwurf, Sartre’s throw-forward) conducted “amid the strategies and options provided by abstract systems.” Unlike the scaffolding model, here the systems are the medium the self navigates against, not the form it is realized through. And Modern self-discovery is intrinsically bound up with reflexive trust-building reveals the distinctive anxiety of this project: since the self is no longer anchored in inherited status, trust in one’s own discovered identity has to be built performatively, through the very process of self-enquiry. Discovery does not confirm a pre-given self; it generates the trust that the self is real.

Now notice what has happened to truth itself within this frame. Modern truth is underwritten by intersubjective control rather than given social status — Luhmann’s account — shows that the same logic invaded epistemology: “behind every experience of objects there are possible statements and behind every statement there lie human processes through which information has been worked on and worked out — not some immutable Truth of Being.” Truth, like the self, was once anchored in status (priestly, political, economic). Now both are anchored in process — intersubjectively controllable, independent of “higher status.” The self and the truth become structurally homologous: neither is given; both must be worked out and worked on, and both stand or fall on the trustworthiness of the process. This is the deep grammar of the double bind. The self cannot be self-founding because the very criteria for what counts as a valid self are processual and social. And the social is precisely what the ideal of the irreplaceable individual was supposed to escape.

The chain now arrives at the complication no one writing before the late twentieth century fully could have staged: what if the self’s construction is itself the engine of the agency it was thought to oppose? Identity is both a source of agency and increasingly constructed rather than given — the joint claim of Giddens and Stuart Hall — holds that identity is always “something constructed in discourse rather than some given sociological or biological essence that preexists representation,” and that this constructedness is a source of agency, not a deficit of it. This is the crucial dialectical move: the denial of a pre-given essence is not melancholy; it is liberation from the very determinants — race, class, gender as given — that the determinist reading threatened. And Marginalized youth actively shape subjectivity rather than passively accept assigned identities gives this its concrete empirical weight: young people are “constituted through difference, but through this spatially and temporally located construction, they shape new modes of subjectivity. They are creative actors, and not passive adapters to external ascriptions of identity.”

But hold on — “constituted through difference” is doing careful work. Identity formation responds to external social pressures rather than pure self-selection cautions that “the formation of subjectivity is not a self-selecting phenomenon.” Subjects become who they are “in relation to larger sociocultural politics, and they learn to maneuver within ever-increasing attempts to stifle their growth.” The double bind stands: marginalized subjects are creative actors because they maneuver against constraint, not because they choose freely. Their agency is real, but it is agency in relation — always exercised against something, always a maneuvering. The prisoner who loves his cell has returned, transformed: Adorno’s despairing figure of manufactured uniqueness has been reinterpreted as a subject who can, within her constraints, “learn to maneuver.” The difference between the prisoner who loves his cell and the actor who maneuvers within it turns out to be the entire political philosophy of modern identity.

So where has the chain led? Simmel opens with a freedom that becomes a demand for irreplaceability. The determining structures (nature’s mechanism, history’s determinism) threaten that irreplaceability from the start. Adorno shows the threat is real: standardization fakes the uniqueness it cannot deliver. Mahmood breaks the frame by showing some selves are realized through their situation. Giddens and Luhmann locate modern selfhood and modern truth in the same reflexive, processual, trust-dependent grammar. And the postcolonial literature shows that within that grammar, the constructed self can be a source of maneuver, not merely a site of determination. Each stop has problematized the one before it, and the whole movement has descended from the abstract claim about freedom into the concrete politics of who gets to call themselves irreplaceable.

The closing insight emerges only by holding all of these against each other: the double bind is not a defect to be escaped but the constitutive structure of modernity itself. The self’s claim to irreplaceability is simultaneously hopeless (Adorno), realizable within and through social forms (Mahmood), processual and trust-dependent (Giddens, Luhmann), and a terrain of genuine maneuvering for the marginalized (Hall, Goldberg, Solomos). The prisoner who loves his cell and the actor who maneuvers within it are the same subject seen from two different temporalities — the first frozen in a present where nothing else remains, the second caught mid-motion, turning the walls into scaffolding. What the chain collectively shows is that these are two descriptions of one situation, and the difference between them is not a fact but an act: whether the determining structure is experienced as container or as launchpad. Modern self-realization just is the perpetual, never-settled negotiation of that act.

The double bind of modern individualism is not a flaw in the project of self-realization but its constitutive grammar: the self’s irreplaceability is simultaneously an unattainable ideal (manufactured as a mass commodity), a reality only reachable through the very social forms the autonomy narrative condemns, and a terrain of genuine agency for those who maneuver within constraining structures. The difference between Adorno’s prisoner and Mahmood’s participant is not a fact about the world but an act — rendering the same determining situation as either cell or scaffolding. This is why the modern self is perpetually unsettled: self-realization cannot be won once and possessed, because its condition of possibility (the social) is exactly what its ideal (irreplaceability) must perpetually deny and re-negotiate.

Agency at the Margins: Embodiment, Performativity, and the Limits of Resignification

Butler’s agency theory is a political praxis against heterosexual normativity’s violence opens the question: if agency is a performative intervention rather than a sovereign will, what exactly is it that resignification can move? Saba Mahmood’s reading insists Butler’s whole theoretical edifice exists to unsettle the dominant discourses of gender and sexuality — agency is a political praxis aimed at the violence heterosexual normativity enacts. But Embodied practices make linguistic resignification alone unable to destabilize norms immediately complicates this: because the force of the body is knowable only through the system of signification, challenge comes specifically from interventions in the signifying features of that system — the reappropriation of “queer,” say, redirecting the force of a reiterative structure and tethering it to a new context of valence.

The problem is that resignification presumes a kind of mobility in the signifier that the social world does not evenly grant. Dominant ideologies structure the range of encodings available rather than being deliberately imposed states the ground condition: the selection of codes that appear to “naturally” incarnate a society’s rationality is not an authorial choice by encoders but a structural horizon that consigns problematic events somewhere within the repertoire of dominant ideologies. This is where the chain takes a genuinely ethnographic turn — because if the available repertoire is itself structured in advance, then linguistic resignification is always rehearsing inside a room whose walls somebody else built. And crucially, Hall insists these are not unified but plural dominant discourses, which is what keeps the door open at all.

Dominants adopt individualism as a new defense when group-based hierarchy is challenged shows what that structured repertoire does under pressure: when subordinates challenge group-based hierarchy, dominants do not concede the ground of the group — they deny the group basis of social life entirely, elevating individualism to a lofty moral principle. Equality of outcomes becomes “reverse discrimination.” This is resignification operating on the resistive side too, and it is why the political stakes of “agency” cut both ways. Autonomy as a secular-liberal ideal is class-differentiated and state-regulated thickens this: the very ideal of the self-governing autonomous citizen — the figure for whom resignification is supposed to be emancipatory — depends on conditions themselves subject to state law and market economy, and the encouragement toward autonomy is directed primarily at the upper classes. The punning shadow here is worth pausing on: “autonomy” and “autonomy”—the one a political ideal, the other the Greek nomos of the self legislating to itself. Asad’s point is that the secular-liberal self is told to govern itself, but the conditions of that self-government are pre-regulated, so autonomy becomes a mandate issued by the very structure it claims to exceed.

Political identity is learned, not an innate hidden self pushes the whole argument down one further level. Hall recounts telling his two-and-a-half-year-old son “You’re black” and getting back “No. I’m brown,” answered with “Wrong referent. Mistaken concreteness, philosophical mistake. I’m not talking about your paintbox, I’m talking about your head.” Identity is a learning, not a discovery — which means the resignifying agent is herself constituted by the very codes she would redirect. And Collective identities like class, race, nation and gender positioned the individual self completes the frame: the great collective social identities placed, positioned, stabilized, and allowed us to read the imperatives of the individual self “almost as a code.” So the agent who resignifies is not presupposed by the performance; she is produced by it, positioned as a subject by the very collective categories she would then tactically subvert.

Here the chain meets its sharpest tension. Butler’s resignification requires a subject who can seize the signifier; Hall and the social-cognition literature show the subject is always already positioned by a structured repertoire that is not of her making and not evenly open to her. People justify the social structure even at the cost of self-enhancement gives the most disturbing datum yet: the subordinate subject does not always resist — she prefers higher-status outgroups over her own ingroup and self-stereotypes on negative attributes, even against her own self-enhancement. Which is the dark underside of agency-as-praxis: if the subject is produced by the structure, then her “agency” can be exercised in the structure’s favor, an inward-turned resignification that confirms rather than unsettles.

The closing observation that emerges only from reading these against each other: resignification’s emancipatory promise rests on a covert bet — that the signifying subject stands far enough from the structure to move it — but the same body of evidence that deflates sovereign agency also reveals that the structure’s hold is not all violence. The stable, livable world heterosexual normativity and the dominant discourses underwrite is also a condition of intelligibility, which is why agency cut loose from embodiment risks promoting a freedom the subordinate subject has no position from which to want.

Butler’s resignification, Hall’s structured repertoire, and the system-justification findings triangulate on a single uncomfortable fact: agency is not freedom from the structure but a capacity the structure itself manufactures, and it can be spent in the structure’s service as readily as against it. The genuinely open question is what resignification looks like when it is exercised by the subordinate against her own interests — whether the “illegible” and “unlivable” positions Butler wants to open are not, for the positioned subject, simply further encodings the repertoire has already consigned her to.

Digressions

Off to the side of the main chains, a few claims resist easy placement but keep tugging at the same raw nerve: the self as a manufactured object. There is something quietly scandalous in William James comparing the persistence of personal identity to branding cattle with one’s own “mark” — the juridical register that turns selfhood from a process of production into a matter of property rights, as if we own ourselves the way a rancher owns a herd. Adjacent to this, Nominalism operates as a social-existential force in postmodern culture flips a philosophical technicality into a lived condition: the flight from transcendence reads differently when nominalism stops being an epistemology and becomes a social and existential force in its own right, a kind of ambient unbelonging that Postmodernism transformed the modernist experience of self-loss into a celebrated utopia of unbelonging only makes stranger — modernist dread repackaged as a morally superior holiday from commitment, Rushdie’s “lone individual occupying a moral high ground above the chimeras of politics.” Meanwhile Habitus theory explains ethnicity’s persistence and flexibility through embodiment, agency, and collective-individual interplay suggests the counterweight: the self that won’t float free, that stays sedimented in the body. And raising the whole question to a dizzying meta-level, New social knowledge alters the social world rather than merely describing it implies that every theory of the self retroactively rewrites the thing it purports to describe — Giddens’s “circularity of social knowledge” looping back on Durkheim and Mauss, whose Durkheim and Mauss argued cognitive categories derive from social relations remains the root claim that most of these detours keep orbiting, never quite touching down.

Unplaced Claims

The planner didn’t fit these into any chain or digression — listed here so nothing vanishes.

Open Questions

  • Is there a distinct, documented phenomenology of the overdetermined subject — a felt texture of being-multiple that is itself produced rather than suffered — in testimony from people who lived under two conflicting regimes of self-production (e.g., colonial and metropolitan, bilingual yet structurally incompatible)? (from The Self as Social Effect: From Given Essence to Produced Individual)
  • Does the ‘raw material’ each theorist smuggles in (Simmel’s drives, Foucault’s body, Marx’s sensuous individual) stay constant across the tradition or mutate — and does its mutation track historical shifts in how production was actually organized? (from The Self as Social Effect: From Given Essence to Produced Individual)
  • What concrete institutional practices (as opposed to philosophical arguments) would instantiate a selfhood that is neither Cartesian-individualist nor communitarian — and has any existing society or movement actually enacted one, or are all actual societies confined to some mixture of the two poles? (from Relational Selfhood: Community, Otherness, and the Constitutive Outside)
  • The ubuntu formula (umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu) is routinely invoked as an alternative to Western individualism, but does its practical deployment in post-apartheid South Africa — in TRC reconciliation, constitutional jurisprudence, and policy — actually reflect the relational ontology it claims, or has it been instrumentalized as a rhetorical cover for the very liberal-individualist state it purports to oppose? How would one verify empirically whether a claimed relational selfhood is operative or merely cited? (from Relational Selfhood: Community, Otherness, and the Constitutive Outside)
  • Does the politicization that converts the sedimented subject from in-itself to for-itself actually redistribute responsibility, or does it merely relocate passivity from the culturalist individual to the politicized group? No claim in this thread supplies a mechanism showing how the for-itself subject, once constituted, reliably resists sustaining the very ideologies that formed it. (from The Discourse Fault Line: Decentered Subjects vs. Unified Consciousness)
  • The critique of Duany shows structuralist accounts erasing subaltern agency in sustaining racist ideology, but no claim here offers a converse test: how well does the decentered/structuralist account handle the perception, from the subaltern’s own position, that whitening is being forcefully imposed rather than merely circulated? That perception would confirm the culturalist respect for lived experience — or reveal it as nostalgia, depending on what an empirical study found. (from The Discourse Fault Line: Decentered Subjects vs. Unified Consciousness)
  • If the pre-Cartesian Mediterranean conception of personhood as ‘possessing reason rather than a representing mind’ was genuinely available and not merely Aristotle’s residue, what specific textual and practical resources — canonical, legal, pedagogical — did colonized scholars continue to draw on to resist the imposed ontology, and where are those sources documented? (from Othering, Ideology, and the Colonial Forge of the Self)
  • Arendt describes antisemitism as a ‘principle of self-definition’ that rescued atomized individuals from instability; does the same psychological function — identity-by-exclusion as a cure for social atomization rather than an expression of group interest — recur with measurable frequency in the colonial cases Mitchell and Stoler document, or is the Nazi case sui generis in making exclusion the primary rather than secondary axis of identity? (from Othering, Ideology, and the Colonial Forge of the Self)
  • Stoler’s letters show the colonizers performing empire even in their ‘private’ selves; does the performance of self-authorship that Goldberg identifies as a white fiction also place a measurable cognitive or psychological demand on colonizers themselves — i.e., is the ‘representing mind’ ontology a burden on its inventors, evidenced anywhere in the colonial archive? (from Othering, Ideology, and the Colonial Forge of the Self)
  • If the defiant identity re-colonizes when fixed, what concrete practices of unfixed identification — Hall’s emergent, historically-emerging subject rather than the essentialized one — have actually been sustained in postcolonial movements (e.g., how did any real movement keep its identity fluid without dissolving into incoherence)? (from Decolonizing the Inner Life: Struggle, Recovery, and the Risk of Re-Colonization)
  • Césaire’s Négritude is charged by Dokman/Towa with extending neo-colonial ideology — yet it remains the single most generative decolonial movement of the 20th century. What precisely distinguishes the moment when an essentialized identity is liberating (the 1930s defiant label) from when it becomes a neo-colonial cage (the later ethnophilosophy) — is the distinction temporal, institutional, or rhetorical? (from Decolonizing the Inner Life: Struggle, Recovery, and the Risk of Re-Colonization)
  • The Fanon passage on rejecting temporal deferral demands ‘completeness’ of the present struggle — while Hall’s emergent subject and Morey’s ‘condition, not identity’ both imply incompleteness is intrinsic. Which is right: is the demand for completeness a necessary psychological fiction of liberation, or actually a re-colonizing attachment to finality that the condition-model corrects? (from Decolonizing the Inner Life: Struggle, Recovery, and the Risk of Re-Colonization)
  • Is there evidence from clinical or psychological research on postcolonial subjects that the inner-life breach Fanon describes — the victory over fear and despair — has measurably different outcomes when tied to a recovered-history narrative versus a defiant-label narrative versus a purely structural (non-identitarian) politics? (from Decolonizing the Inner Life: Struggle, Recovery, and the Risk of Re-Colonization)
  • If individuality is the emergent clash of overlapping social types, does the cosmopolitan’s typically — the sheer number of categories simultaneously available in urban life — positively correlate with individual personality richness? No claim here tests whether more available categories produce more articulated selves, though the logic implies it. (from Categorical Selves: Cognitive Tools, Social Types, and the Modern Self)
  • The finding that collectivists describe roles while individualists describe categories is presented as contemporaneous; how does this pattern shift under rapid urbanization — does migration into cities convert role-based relational selves into category-based collective selves in one generation, as Lofland’s historical account would predict? (from Categorical Selves: Cognitive Tools, Social Types, and the Modern Self)
  • If self-realization-through-determining-structures turns on whether a situation is experienced as scaffold or cell, what empirically distinguishes situations that enable the scaffold experience from those that foreclose it? The claims here describe the experience as real in both cases but supply no criterion for when constraint can be converted into launchpad versus when it remains pure domination — a question that would require close, comparative study of actually-lived institutional settings. (from The Double Bind of Modern Individualism: Self-Realization vs. Determining Structures)
  • Mahmood’s scaffolding model asserts that prescribed conduct serves self-realization, but the chain lacks any symmetric account of the reverse case: whether the Western autonomy ideal can function as scaffolding for selves formed within it, and under what conditions that ideal itself becomes a repressive external imposition rather than a liberating form. No claim here tests the frame from the other direction. (from The Double Bind of Modern Individualism: Self-Realization vs. Determining Structures)
  • Is there an empirical test distinguishing ‘tactical’ resignification from ‘system-justifying’ resignification — e.g., does the successful reappropriation of a term like ‘queer’ actually track changes in the structure’s violent effects, or only in its signifying surface, for subordinate subjects? No claim in this thread supplies evidence on outcomes rather than intentions. (from Agency at the Margins: Embodiment, Performativity, and the Limits of Resignification)
  • Mahmood’s own counter-example of pious Muslim women’s embodied agency is gestured at but never developed here: what does agency as submission (rather than subversion) reveal about the assumption woven through Butler, Hall, and the prejudice literature that agency and resistance are the same thing? (from Agency at the Margins: Embodiment, Performativity, and the Limits of Resignification)
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