ABSTRACT
Since its earliest formulations, the notion of identity in social theory has been linked to broad social transformations associated with modernity that promote processes of self-actualization and self-invention. In ‘Fundamental problems of sociology’ (1950), for example, Georg Simmel wrote of a ‘new individualism’ arising in the wider context of the modern metropolis and money economy. ‘The individual’, according to Simmel, ‘seeks his self as if he did not yet have it, and yet, at the same time, is certain that his only fixed point is this self’ (1950: 79). Simmel’s self-actualizing individual represented a powerful attempt to theorize the extent to which the logics of modernity penetrate all the way down into the lived textures of ‘personal subjectivity’, in and through which the individual is reconstituted as a work of self-assembly, self-construction and self-invention. Shift forward a hundred years and one finds contemporary social theorists likewise underscoring the profoundly inventive aspects of self-constitution within the distinctive features of a globalizing age. Recent efforts to generate a new theory of invented identities span a number of rubrics: ‘individualization’, ‘reflexive self-identity’, ‘liquid lives’ and ‘new individualism’. All of these approaches, as I shall examine in this chapter, confront a conjuncture of transformed social conditions (such as globalization, new information technologies and the advent of an allegedly universalizing consumerism) and concomitant individualizing pressures. In so doing, these approaches underscore how identities today are constantly renewed, revised and reconstituted in day-to-day social conduct, although only rarely is analytical attention devoted to the profoundly imaginary dimensions of such self- constitution and self-revision.
