Conclusions

MAKING SELVES

Identity is a first order concern of human beings. It begins in childhood with the recognition that we are physically distinct from others no matter how closely we resemble them. With maturity, we come to understand that we are responsible for our behavior and goals in ways that less reflective, more instinct-driven species are not. All forms of social identification -- from family to species -- involve differentiation from others. They also require us to draw closer to other members of our social unit. Identities involve integration in a second way: a meaningful sense of self is greatly facilitated by close relations with those from whom we differentiate ourselves.

Discourses about identity largely ignore this dynamic. They recognize only one kind of integration: affiliation and bonding with others in the same family, group, or state. This one-sided understanding arises from the conception of the autonomous self, which is endemic to social science and contemporary conceptions of identity. It is the foundation of economic and rational choice theories, both of which build on the myth of autonomous, egoistic individuals making decisions on the basis of self-interest. Since Kant and Hegel, scholars, intellectuals and politicians have generally assumed that identities form and solidarity is built and enhanced by emphasizing how we differ in positive ways from others. This conceptualization, which emphasizes autonomous actors, directs our attention to markers of identity and the boundaries we create to distinguish us from others. Boundary maintenance is commonly assumed, or at least be abetted by, negative stereotypes of these others.

Chapter three turned to Homer and Virgil for a different understanding of identity formation and maintenance, one based on empathetic relations with others and nuanced understandings of them. In the Iliad, Greeks and Trojans possess strong identities prior to their war, and there is no evidence that they achieve group solidarity as a result of the conflict. It reveals Greek unity to be fragile and it is nearly destroyed by the intense antagonism between Achilles and Agamemnon. The Trojan War highlights the mutual dependence of Greeks and Trojans, as warrior aristocrats on both sides yearn to compete for aristeia. This is only possible against an adversary who has similar values and practices. Warriors respect one another and have strong incentives to acknowledge publicly the outstanding qualities of their adversaries. War nevertheless involves death and sacrifice and the anger they arouse threatens to undermine the norms governing relations between adversaries and among Greeks. Cooperation between the warring camps reaches its climax in Priam’s successful ransom of his son’s body from Achilles. Through this encounter, Achilles, the best of the Achaeans, regains his humanity and identity.

In the Aeneid, Virgil implies that the Trojans must expand their identity to gain empire. On the verge of victory, Aeneas promises the defeated Italians that they will never have to bow to Trojans. “May both nations," he proclaims, "under equal laws, march together toward an eternal pact of peace.”³⁰ His message is reinforced by Jove and Juno, who command the Trojans and Latins to blend into a stronger, hybrid people.³¹ Writing as an Italian Roman, Virgil is, in effect, urging Augustus to treat contemporary Roman citizens equally, regardless of their territorial origins. By this form of identity stretching Augustus can marshal support through the Empire and realize Jove’s prophecy. Aeneas is offered as a prototype. He allies with Etruscans and various Latins and marries the Latin princess Lavinia, making clear that Rome is a multicultural project from the outset.

Homer's approach to identity receives considerable support from recent research in social psychology on group formation. It indicates that the creation of "others" and negative stereotypes about them are not necessary for group formation and solidarity. Such images are a special case and most likely to develop when groups compete for scarce resources.³² This understanding of identity is shared by psychiatrists who study child development. Freud maintained that the ego emerges as a consequence of identification with others, and that the self arises from the resulting tensions within the child. Contemporary psychiatrists describe identity formation as biologically programmed and manifested early in life when infants struggle to understand themselves as beings in their own right distinct from parents and other caregivers.³³ Such recognition usually develops by the age of four.³⁴ Robust, confident identities are most likely in families where a sense of self develops in the context of positive feelings towards other family members and care givers.³⁵

Identity formation is best understood as a dialectical process in which we become ourselves by drawing closer to others while at the same time separating from them. At every level of social aggregation identity formation should be studied in the context of relationships, not as an isolated unitary phenomenon. Other actors provide positive and negative role models as well as feedback about our behavior, all of which is essential to how individuals, institutions and states shape and maintain their sense of self.

The self does not form so much in opposition to the “other” as it does in conjunction with it. In the course of such an interaction, the self is constructed and develops the potential to become stretched. This understanding of identity receives its first theoretical treatment in Plato for whom identity is a reflection of a universal form. People are distinct but linked to one another by virtue of their connection to this form. Otherness is a highly visible but superficial feature of identity.³⁶ On a more practical level, Plato, like Thucydides, contends that cities – that is, political orders – depend on affection and friendship [philia]. These bonds encourage empathy that enables us to see ourselves through the eyes of others. We come to recognize that our framing of justice – and everything else -- is parochial and that our happiness and identity depend on those of our families, friends and fellow citizens. Plato also considers friendship important because it creates an atmosphere of trust in which meaningful dialogue becomes possible. In his Republic, Socrates’ positions never represent any final truth. His interlocutors make arguments that he cannot fully refute, or chooses not to. Deeper understandings only arise from a holistic understanding of competing claims and positions.³⁷

With modernity, friendship again comes to the forefront as the foundation of order and even of human fulfillment. Hobbes describes “fellow-feeling” and sympathy for others as natural proclivities of human beings and relies as much on them as a Leviathan to construct and maintain society.³⁸ Adam Smith attributes moral sensitivity to empathy. Our ability to experience the pain and pleasure of others, and our desire to have them experience ours, keeps us from being entirely selfish.³⁹ Socrates’ emphasis on dialogue has been revived in the twentieth century, and is central to the writings of figures as diverse as Mikhail Bakhtin, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas.⁴⁰ For Gadamer, dialogue “is the art of having a conversation, and that includes the art of having a conversation with oneself and fervently seeking and understanding of oneself.”⁴¹ It puts us in touch with ourselves and others. Experiencing the other through dialogue can lead to exstasis, or the experience of being outside of oneself. Dialogue can be understood as a means of extending our personal horizons and identities and by this means allows us to escape in part from the confines of culture and power structures.⁴² Critical hermeneutics of the kind advocated by Gadamer implicitly assumes that in the modern world with all its diverse interlocutors, in contrast to Achilles and Priam, we can find a language that promotes empathy and helps to construct new identities.

The Homeric understanding of identity suggests that separation need not involve alienation or antagonism. Individuals, groups and even nations can construct distinct identities, and social units encourage solidarity, in the absence of hostility toward others and negative stereotypes of them. Collaborative identity construction confers many benefits: it provides the basis for continuing good relations with other actors, serves as a corrective for unhealthy and destructive forms of self-involvement and the foundation for a still wider circle of relationships. Arguably, these kinds of relationships make us human, or at least bring out and develop those qualities many of us associate with the best side of human nature. This is a question to which I revisit later in this chapter when I take up the problem of identity at the species level.

AGENCY

In traditional societies where there are few roles and most of them ascribed, people knew who they were and their identities were confirmed on a daily basis by practices. People may have been unhappy about being peasants but for the most part did not deny their status to others or themselves. Attempts to do so would have been difficult and likely to have met resistance.⁴³ James Scott contends that it is not all that much easier in the modern world as states have invented multiple categories of identification to which they assign people.⁴⁴ Modernity is nevertheless characterized by widespread attempts -- many of them successful -- to escape, finesse or otherwise transform assigned categories and roles. In the so-called post-modern era especially, people have compelled state bureaucracies to reformulate, loosen or drop long used categories of identification. A nice example is the categories the American census uses to determine so-called race.⁴⁵

Meaningful agency requires some possibility of choice and self-fashioning, and this was made possible in the modern era by changes in both material and ideational conditions: a more complex division of labor, proliferation of roles and the emergence of discourses that problematize existing roles and identities and theorize alternatives. Isaiah Berlin describes the "apotheosis of the will" as a defining feature of modernity.⁴⁶ For Romantics, agency becomes an end in itself, even if its consequences are often destructive, as they are for Turgenev's Zinaida and Yeat's aviator.⁴⁷

Agency is a deeply problematic concept for conceptual and empirical reasons. It is a widely used term used to signify different, sometimes contradictory things. In rational choice and strategic interaction models it refers to actors' calculations and decisions. Social scientists who use such models explain agency in one of two ways: as choices based on actor preferences and assessments of the likelihood of satisfying them, or as choices based on incentives and constraints generated by the environment in which actors function. The former put more emphasis on agency because individual preferences are considered of prime importance. The latter minimizes agency by treating actors as more as less interchangeable if their circumstances are similar, an assumption without which these models would have no traction.

Political philosophers have generally advocated more expansive notions of agency. Many refuse to consider actions taken in response to either internal or external pressures as evidence of real agency, or freedom. Plato insists that rule by one’s appetites is the worst form of tyranny and that agency begins with the individual or city learning to restrain and educate appetite and spirit alike.⁴⁸ Kant offers a critique of external agency in his distinction between Wille [the manifestation of reason in its practical form] and Willkür [the faculty of choice, a manifestation of practical reason]. He contends that real freedom, or rational agency, is the capacity to act for oneself independently of the causality of nature or society.⁴⁹ He roots this capacity in his transcendental idea of freedom. It provides “a complement of sufficiency” that is based on “absolute spontaneity of the will.”⁵⁰ Hegel comes at the problem from a different angle. In Phenomenology of the Spirit, he emphasizes the behavioral conformism imposed by the conventions of language and how this limits the spontaneity of the self. Mead offers a third take on external constraints. For him, social categorization and its associated attributions constitute the principal external constraint to our freedom. They give rise to the “me” – that part of the self that internalizes the attitudes and expectations of others. However, the “I” – the actor’s response to others – can provide a sense of freedom and initiative “as it is never entirely calculable or merely a response to situational demands.^”51 The point here is not to catalog what different theorists say about agency but to stress the widely shared understanding that true agency requires something beyond simple choice and behavior based on it.⁵² It must be free choice, a choice that is rooted in one’s so-called identity or rationally constructed agenda, and not merely a response to appetite, socialization or other social pressures. Empirically, such claims are notoriously difficult to establish. As Durkheim notes, individuals have a strong illusion of agency.⁵³

Agency drives social change of all kinds but we know relatively little about the various mechanisms by which this happens. In some circumstances, for example, African-Americans fighting segregation, it required conscious, and often courageous, rejection of existing social, institutional or legal realities. Other changes are the result of a countless, small unrecorded acts. Consider how the practice of professor has changed since the 1960s. Publishing has replaced teaching as the most important criterion for hiring and promotion at universities, sexual relationships with students are now verboten and the boundaries of the professorial role have been redefined. The professoriate has become open to qualified PhD’s regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual preference and the status of professors has declined relative to many other professions. Some of these changes were initiated from above but most came about through practice and in response to value shifts in the profession and society at large.

My texts offer insight into one of the ways in which the quiet, less dramatic form of agency finds expression. They draw our attention to role playing as a key feature of modernity and a vehicle for many of the changes in roles and identities that we associate with it. The Mozart operas, while fictional, build on and often mimic contemporary practices. Role playing on stage, in books and at social gatherings stimulated its real life counterpart. It encouraged people to think of roles as social constructs that could be performed well by people not born or raised into them and its corollary, that people had choices regarding roles and their performance. This recognition encouraged social experimentation and the blurring and even crossing of traditional social boundaries. In a deeper sense, as Shakespeare's histories suggest and Nietzsche explicitly observes, role playing puts us in the bodies and minds of others and blurs the boundaries and distinctions between them and us.⁵⁴ Role playing not only lets us examine other selves by imitating them, it lets us examine ourselves by temporarily stepping outside of them.

Greeks and Romans viewed roles positively. They gave identities to people and made society possible. The ancients pitied people outside of society because without assigned roles they lacked identities and were incapable of realizing their human potential. Hobbes adopted this perspective in Leviathan, where his state of nature reveals that people stripped of the roles and relationships society provides act on the basis of raw needs and passions. Thinking about roles and role playing underwent revision in the Renaissance. Hobbes gives an inkling of the direction of this change in his equation of persons with actors, both of whom can choose how to represent themselves to others.⁵⁵ In The Prince, Machiavelli urges leaders to assume deceptive stances toward other princes and their own peoples. Chapter two noted now Thomas More was aware of acting this way as Lord Chancellor, but also in his family as husband and father – and his discomfort in doing so.

The ancient metaphor of theatrum mundi or scaena vitae [theater of the world] was intended to drive home the vanity of human life. Individuals were puppets of the gods who arranged and observed their performances. St. John Chrysostom, Augustine and John of Salisbury gave voice to Christianized versions of this trope. By the end of the Middle Ages it was used together with such popular images as the Dance of Death and the Ship of Fools to symbolize the insignificance of the secular world.⁵⁶ Like Hobbes' invocation of theatrum mundi, Shakespeare's famous description of the world as a stage and people as actors is sharply at odds with the classical understanding in a double sense. It is entirely secular in that people are the impresarios, spectators and actors, and those on stage have some leeway in the roles they perform and how they present themselves. The metaphor is now being used to signify the human potential for, and actual practice of, self-reflection and self-fashioning. With self-fashioning comes the possibility not only of representing what we think of as ourselves but of dissimulation, that is the portrayal of those whom we know we are not. Elizabethan England witnessed a rising concern for distinguishing the true character of people from their possibly deceptive masks.⁵⁷

Dissimulation was encouraged by society's reliance on roles and their outward markers as signs of status. With even minimal wealth they could be feigned or acquired, which made it easier to cross class barriers. By the eighteenth century, it was possible to purchase patents of nobility, something that legitimized and further encouraged the crossing of boundaries.⁵⁸ As society grew larger and interactions more impersonal, it became easier for people to adopt higher status roles than it was in days when people knew one another. Status hierarchies were porous in both directions. Chapter four described how Spanish nobles in search of sexual adventures donned capes and masks to mix with lower class women. Beaumarchais witnessed this practice in Madrid and incorporated it into his Marriage of Figaro. Mozart and Da Ponte feature this practice not only in their opera based on the Beaumarchais play, but in Don Giovanni, where Giovanni compels Leporello to exchange costumes with him for purposes of seduction.

In Così fan tutti, the two male suitors adopt disguises to seduce each other's inamorata. Critics at the time, and many since, consider its libretto morally corrupt and entirely unsuitable to Mozart's genius. Così fan tutti appears to legitimate role playing for erotic ends, and worse still, to undermine the institution of marriage by showing the arbitrary and fickle nature of the romantic attachments on which it was increasingly based. I argue in chapter four that the plot facilitated the intellectual goals of composer and librettist as it was part of their thought experiment to probe the consequences of ancien régime and Enlightenment identities under widely varying circumstances. It also provides the opportunity for the more sophisticated Don Alfonso and Despina to educate the young couples by destroying their illusions about love and by doing so, lay the foundations for a social order based on equal doses of reason and cynicism. Così fan tutti is an epistolary, even revolutionary opera.

As the reaction to Così fan tutti indicates, traditionalists focused on the perceived immorality of role playing and did their best to limit it through regulation of dress, theater and other amusements. Chapter four describes how Spanish authorities sought to suppress role playing and social mixing. The reforming ministers were concerned with crime but also objected to the social confusion, loss of legibility, libertinage, laziness and bad hygiene they believed capes and hats to promote. Anti-majismo legislation aroused resistance and led to a popular revolt in 1766, known as esquilache riot [riot of the cape and hat]. The government suppressed the demonstrations, which in retrospect came to be considered the first collective revolt against Enlightenment-inspired reforms.⁵⁹ The riot had the immediate effect of politicizing habits, which in turn encouraged their conceptualization by journalists and writers. Majismo became more self-conscious and culturally elaborated and a principal subject of popular theater, literature, music and art, especially inexpensive prints.

Sumptuary laws also backfired. Louis XIV was frustrated in his attempt to regulate clothing, as were similar efforts in seventeenth century Italy, Spain, England and Holland. Diderot observed that everyone at court tried to resemble people above them and in the process blurred social distinctions.⁶⁰ Norbert Elias found that court gradations intensified the struggle for prestige because they made it possible to define, as with money, the value of every increment with respect to others.⁶¹ This only accelerated efforts by the rich to move upwards in status. Censorship and theater reforms also had unintended consequences. The kind of theater encouraged by moral reformers like Jovellanos in Madrid and Joseph II in Vienna helped to undermine the social order by encouraging people to regard roles as conventions sustained by performance. It also encouraged the kind of social mixing of different classes and religions that so horrified conservatives.

Theater and opera were not the only fronts on which role playing was encouraged and explored. Epistolary novels, that bridged the boundary between fact and fiction, were very influential as people strongly identified with their characters. Richardson's Pamela, Rousseau's Julie and Goethe's Werther are the best-known examples. Literature opened up a space where the self could be explored without the usual social constraints. Abbé de Condillac was among the first eighteenth century writers to recognize that people remade themselves by emulating consecutive role models. They mix and match attributes of real or fictional characters to become "a different combination of borrowed traits and habits."⁶²

The German Enlightenment encouraged the formation of reading circles that brought people together socially in the context of book discussions.⁶³ In Berlin, in the 1790s, reading aloud and discussion was supplemented by musical performances, dancing, card games and role playing. Guests were often required to come dressed as some real or fictional figure and act the part for the duration of the evening.⁶⁴ Masked balls became popular among the upper classes, and Mozart and Da Ponte have Don Giovanni stage one in the hope of seducing Zerlina. As I noted in chapter four, three bands simultaneously play three different kinds of dance music. Two of them are representative of different classes and the third is free of class associations. Using counterpoint, Mozart harmonizes these dances and their distinctive rhythms. Following the Don’s botched seduction, this elaborate structure breaks down and the music becomes cacophonous. This scene lends itself to multiple readings, one of which suggests there is nothing unnatural about cross-class social encounters as the three dances are readily reconciled musically.

Those who welcomed civil society welcomed role playing. Kant thought it socialized people into behaving in a more civilized manner. "For if men keep on playing these roles," he wrote in his lectures on anthropology, "the real virtues whose semblance they have merely been affecting for a long time are gradually aroused and pass into their attitude of will."⁶⁵ In Britain, Boswell, Smith and Hume looked to society to provide models on the basis of which individuals could construct themselves. John Stuart Mill echoed their arguments in the nineteenth century. In contrast to the Kantian hope that people would find rationality within themselves and reflected in others and by this means come to a more universal understanding of moral law, Mill's individuals discover what makes them different through their interactions with others. Echoing Condillac, he suggests that by imitating different features of different people we meet, we formulate distinct selves. Through this process, "human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth belong to."⁶⁶ Mill's formulation, like Smith's, reveals an abiding optimism in the prospect of individual improvement through social interaction.

The embrace of civil society and role playing as a vehicle for identity construction is

the quintessential expression of strategy three, the first in an historical sense, of the two modern strategies of identity construction that I described in the Introduction. They both welcome interiority and reflexivity, but regard society quite differently. For strategy two, as Boswell, Smith, Hume and Mill believed or hoped, society and individual identity are compatible and even mutually constitutive. This is an optimistic strategy, as it assume that society will provide useful role models, that individuals – not just rich and powerful ones -- will have the freedom and will to choose diverse role models and that their choices will feed back positively into society. At best, I believe, these conditions have only been partially met in the developed industrial world.

The anti-Enlightenment and Romantic movements gave the metaphor of role playing a new, and darker meaning. By positing something inherently unique about individuals, they made it incumbent upon them to discover and express their inner selves. Donning a mask and playing a role was considered a serious impediment to internal discovery and self-expression. Rousseau insisted that the art of acting was nothing less than "counterfeiting oneself."⁶⁷ Rousseau and the Romantics developed the fourth strategy of identity construction. They welcomed interiority and reflexivity, but rejected society and its roles as sources of oppression, not of liberation. Their frame of reference set the stage, so to speak, for multiple philosophical and political projects intended to overcome this tension through a radical focus on and assertion of individual uniqueness and identity.

Mozart’s operas explore these different understandings of role playing and identity construction. Don Giovanni appears to reflect Rousseau’s condemnation of acting as a form of counterfeiting oneself, except in the case of Giovanni there is no self to counterfeit. All of his roles are equally superficial, and none of them achieve the benefits described by Hobbes, Smith, Kant or Mill. The opera can nevertheless be read as a critique of Rousseau’s assumption that human character will improve once purged of the false roles and values put in place by society. Don Giovanni, who shreds these roles and their associated conventions, appears to validate the contention of the Greeks, Hobbes and Musil that without social roles people quickly lose the attributes of civilization.

Role playing is equally central to the Marriage of Figaro. Count Almaviva, like Don Giovanni, dons a cloak for purposes of seduction. Cherubino disguises himself as a woman for the same end. Figaro, Susannah and the Countess assume disguises in the night-time rendezvous scene to foil the Count's plans. Their characters are not undermined but strengthened by this ruse, unintentionally in the case of the Count, who, for at least the times being, is compelled to reassume his more responsible guise. The most interesting figure is Figaro who is under deep cover as a servant -- so deep that he is unaware he is playing a role -- because he does not know he is the illegitimate offspring of nobles. His origins are ultimately revealed and he readily assumes the role of gentleman, one we perceive that will give more range to his varied talents. Figaro’s reversal -- the very opposite of an Aristotelian peripeteia in that his situation improves – was undoubtedly used by Beaumarchais to defuse whatever concerns the censors might have had about an intelligent, uppity and successful servant. To his audiences, it nevertheless suggests that character is independent of roles – quite contrary to the assertions of the ancien régime – and even more radically, makes clear the scope people have to exercise that character is very much dependent on class.