Download Francisco Morral

Francisco Morral-Cardoner
PHd student in sociology at Goldsmiths College.
'Meta-Culture' and 'Fluid identity'
Abstract:
'Meta-Culture' is the process of gradual homogeneisation that a culture experiences when it enters into contact with the
West in its facets of Globalisation and trans-nationalism. Indeed, with the flow of people and goods, there is also a
constant flow of meanings (vague or otherwise), which, eventually, forces a cultural unit to coalesce (gradually or
catastrophically) into an ideal and coherent system of understandings that set the boundaries for 'membership belonging'.
I call them Meta-Cultures because they are based upon a meta-narrative of 'culture' as both, ‘a priori’, and ‘a posteriori’.
Meta-Cultures transcend nation-state frontiers because the unity of the nation-sate is based upon homogeneity, whilst
meta-cultures are heterogeneous in nature
Meta-Culture is based upon hybridity, yet members of this imagined construct believe it to be 'pure' and 'undistorted'.
Indeed, they think that membership of this 'Pan-national' group is what enables them to adopt territory-transcending and
multi-posed identities. By projecting their fragmented identity into a constructed 'cultural' ideal, they manage to sublimate
a process 'in-the -making' and cause it to be perceived as something which 'was-always-there'.
Meta-culture allows for the creation of an Intermezzo culture which produces liminal identities which link together different
social collectivities. Thus, Meta-cultural identity is both a form of cultural resistance and an affirmation of alternative lives.
Meta-cultural identity is, perhaps, the only social structure which is not maintained by the influence of political power
insofar as it is legitimated through ideology and consensus.
Meta-Cultural individuals perform their identity to an audience and find legitimation on the fact that they belong to
exclusive groups. Indeed, Meta-Cultures are based on individual acts of self-identification, often resulting in superficial
affiliation rather than in in-depth social understanding.
In a Sartrean way, one may be born into an identity, but one may or may not choose to perform that 'given' identity. It
so happens, that more often than not, we perform that identity as a 'theme, fuge and variations'. Our identity becomes an
exercise in creativity. It becomes ‘fluid’.
Fluid identities are divided alongside superficial patterns of belonging and consumption, but they also provide with a wider
range of tools to solution everyday problems, insofar as different Meta-cultures have different established methods from
where to choose solutions to different contexts. Also, Fluid identities allow the individual to project his existential angst not
onto God, or the Gods (as it has been the traditional way for centuries) but unto the ‘other’ (s/he who is not us) in order to
deal with frustration and (perceived) injustice.
Meta-Cultures and Fluid identities: the myth of the eternal return and Religious
fundamentalism
This research proposes to investigate the links between identity, culture and
fundamentalist/extremist thought.
I argue that the construction of identity is developed through the adherence to what I
like to call Meta-Culture (an imagined and rather Platonic ideal community which exists
beyond national boundaries or social barriers). Meta-Culture is based upon hybridity,
yet members of this imagined construct believe it to be 'pure' and 'undistorted'. Indeed,
they think that membership of this 'Pan-national' group is what enables them to adopt
territory-transcending and multi-posed identities. By projecting their fragmented identity
into a constructed 'cultural' ideal, they manage to sublimate a process 'in-the -making'
and cause it to be perceived as something which 'was-always-there'.
Meta-Cultures transcend nation-state frontiers because the unity of the nation-sate is
based upon homogeneity, whilst meta-cultures are heterogeneous in nature. They are
based upon a meta-narrative of 'culture' as both, a priori, and a posteriori, as 'potential'
but, also 'retroactively'.
The development of (Meta-Cultural) identity always works through the creation of a
distinction (artificial or not) between the exalted 'us' and the denigrated 'other'. Identity
finds its place in the social world through an act of discrimination.
Meta -culture is a constructed order which takes culture as point of reference but
develops it further as a pattern of meanings, which, in its more advanced stages favours
virtuosistic (although sterile) elaboration. It develops a baroque richness of surface at
the expense of socio-political substance. This is what Geertz called 'involution'.
However, whilst Geertz though of it as a sign of degeneration, I believe it to be a healthy
sign of evolution. Indeed, any attempt to reconstruct one's own culture has to be done
using as a point of departure an ideal past. Meta cultural identity is a construct of both
individual and “groupal” attempts to re-make the past.
Identity and extremism/fundamentalism
Developing models of identity normally follow two patterns which are mutually exclusive:
Integrationist, which attempts to diminish distinction (not always successfully) among
actors, emphasizing the fact that they are participants in the social system, and
therefore, ought to be included in it.
Separatist, which acknowledges distinction and attempts to re-construct those
distinctions as something inherently good that has to be accepted and respected inside
the social system
Identity is an absence of presence, a state of mind never to be achieved. As Zigmunt
Bauman says identity is not something that we want to construct and maintain fixed, but
rather something that we want to construct in a way that it will avoid fixation, thus,
allowing an endless choice of open options. Yet, when we develop identity following one
of the paths aforementioned, we run the risk of falling into cases of extremism and/or
fundamentalism.
Meta-Cultures and fluid identities play a key role on the creation and development of
identity politics insofar as they allow individuals to maintain different identities at the
same time, switching from one to the other depending on the context. Thus, the frontiers
between 'identities' become blurred and as a result, identity politics tend to lose
coherence.
In order to overcome this dilution of identity, the individual evolves more and more
complex meta-cultures. This, in time, becomes extremism and or fundamentalism.
Indeed, extremism and fundamentalism are weak meta-cultures which lost meaning and
forced the individual to ‘develop form’ to a maximum degree (as opposed to ‘evolve
meaning’ to a maximum degree) in order to recover a sense of belonging.
Culture, Meta-Culture and Involution
If culture is an ordered system of meaning and symbols in terms of which individuals
define their world. Meta -culture is a constructed order which takes culture as point of
reference but develops it further as a leiv-motiff of signs, which, in its more advanced
stages favours external elaboration at the expense of theoretical substance. This is
what Geertz called 'involution'. Contrary to what it may seem involution does not
necessarily imply degeneration. In fact, 'involution' is a necessary stage on the
development of ideas. This is to say, when a social group has evolved beyond its
immediate means, it finds itself confronted with its own rapid development, very few
societies and/or individuals are prepared to continue their own evolution to the next
stage insofar as evolution is always traumatic. Hence, there is a tendency to 'revert' to
an 'ideal' state when radical developments had not started yet. However, since
developments have, indeed, taken place, involution (or regression) is hollow in nature,
and is eventually superseded by the natural tendency for societies and individuals to
evolve on their own accord.
Involution is an attempt to reconstruct one's own culture before a perceived 'time of
the fall' and it is done using as a point of departure an ideal past. This 'ideal past' may
take multiple forms, depending on the social group to which it applies, it may take the
shape of 'nationalism', 'racial purity' 'religious violence (or religious stagnation for that
matter)’, etc.
Involution is, per se, the regression to an 'invented tradition' which bears little
resemblance to the pre-modern past, and by 'invention' we do not necessarily mean
fabrication, but rather 'recreation'. Indeed, any form of collective identity is neither true
nor false but somewhere in between. It allows for a kind of alchemical wedding between
history and fictional reinterpretation of the past.
State and individual identities
The main difference between spontaneous socio-cultural development and any statesponsored construction of identity is that the state attempts to homogenise culture whilst
individuals prefer to heterogenise its own 'invented traditions'. The result of this
ideological conflict is the development of a 'Meta cultural' identity which is a construct of
both, state (groupal) and individual (social actors) attempts to re-make the past.
However, the fact that Meta-Culture is the result of a conflict between the state and
(more or less) independent social units does not translate itself in the production of
fragmentary identities, on the contrary, Meta-Cultural identity is complete at any given
time. However, its 'completeness' is perfunctory. It is measured in very brief spans of
time after which, identity evolves into another shape. Thus, identity seems to change
constantly, yet it is complete in each change. Therefore, due to its inability to maintain
itself 'fixed' for long, we can consider identity as being 'liminal' in nature. Furthermore,
since Meta-culture is both the cause and the by-product of identity, Meta-Culture has a
tendency towards liminality itself. Indeed, due to the fact that identity is always on the
brink of change, identity can be considered as being 'liminal'. Identity is neither here nor
there, it is a vague and shape-shifting concept. Yet, for all its vagueness, people who
share (or think that they share) the same 'identity' experience a sense of 'brotherhood'
among themselves (Turner calls this 'communitas’) which characterises itself by the lack
of structural attributes. This is not to say (as Turner seems to do) that 'communitas'
lacks social structure, it only means that members of a group can function outside
society. However, to be outside society is a dangerous affair, because humans have a
natural tendency to mimic that which is known to them. Thus, any group which purports
to function outside society, will eventually copy the structures of the society from where
it comes. Hence, what once was 'liminal' becomes less so with the passage of time.
However, communitas only becomes structured by emphasising the performative part of
collective identity. This 'performative feeling' is what Victor Turner defined as ritual.
Hence, we can consider identity as not only 'liminal', but also, 'ritual'. Yet, this kind of
ritual is social in nature. Therefore, identity is the performance of a social ritual of
liminality. Moreover, since social performance is an attempt by social actors to convey
(and therefore, fix) an ever-changing meaning (consciously or otherwise) which not only
reflects, but also criticises society, then, logically, identity is an attempt to both,
construct and destruct society at the same time.
The ‘ideal’ of identity
Identity promises a metaphysical deliverance which never comes. The task of choosing
identity only opens the doors to more possible choices. For each identity 'out there'
there are a hundred more inside our selves waiting to get out. Identity is a production of
'self' which only acquires meaning by the act of sheer repetition. Any attempt to break
this pattern of reiteration is doomed to fail insofar as identity exists only as an ideal
concept from where or to where we escape. Indeed, Identity is both oppressive and
oppressor.
Identity is oppressive because, up to a certain degree, we are always attempting to
break with our given identities and to create others with which we may feel more
comfortable.
Identity is oppressor because is an attempt to breach and fight prohibition. If there is no
risk of prohibition, identity is oppressed by the sheer fact of not being recognised.
Therefore it has to be made blatantly visible in order to be 'prohibitable'.
This seeming paradox is due to the fact that identity remakes itself not in opposition to
the 'other' but in opposition to an ideal of itself insofar as mimetism cannot be separated
from identity (in fact, it is the reason for 'identity' to be), therefore 'identity' becomes an
'other' to itself, a kind of incessant imitation of its own idealisation. It has to elaborate
itself further and further because it believes to be always at risk of disappearing by the
actions of others.
With the virtuosistic elaboration of identity, the individual also elaborates, up to a
certain point, a fictitious reality to fit into his/her own experience in which to transcend
their individuality and become 'representatives' of the culture which they purport to
share. I say 'purport' because, more often than not, meta-cultural identity is constructed
upon unexamined beliefs in response to generic situations. Indeed, whilst Meta-Cultural
identity has the potential to be extreme complex, it has a tendency to start as a
simplistic idea which, then, gets further and further elaborated in a kind of selfreferential loop.
This elaboration is a by-product from to the breakdown of established social
identifications insofar as 'identity' is no longer a monolithic construct, but a shapeshifting idea where everything is ambivalent, unstable and devoid of social meaning.
Indeed, it is the duty of the individual to construct the realities of his/her everyday life by
projection, interaction and identification.
Every individual who develops a self-conscious Meta-Cultural identity
(notwithstanding the degree of elaboration of it) is forced, eventually, to chose between
integrationism or separatism. Whilst the former is more mainstream and presents a
sanitised and friendly version of identity, the latter is born out of rage and a desire for
the subversion of normativity. As Zigmunt Bauman says identity is not something that
we want to construct and maintain fixed, but rather something that we want to construct
in a way that it will avoid fixation, thus, allowing an endless choice of open options.
Identity is supposed to be the result of a constant act of repetition, but modern society
maintains itself by sheer virtue of constant negation (only if things are endlessly
replaced by others can culture maintain the imaginary ideal of cohesion). Therefore
identity and modern society are diametrical opposites. The only way for individuals to
escape the ill effects of this 'bipolarity' is through the use of Meta-culture and the
development of 'fluid identities'
'Meta-Culture' and ‘Fluid identities’
Meta-Cultures are created by the unconscious need of the individual to 'belong' to
something larger than his/her self. Our modern online environment facilitates
fragmentation of identity yet, at risk of sounding Cartesian, people thinks, thinking
causes self-awarement. Self-awarement causes further thinking, which eventually leads
to questioning. From self-questioning, identity rises and changes.
Who am I? We think we know the answer at a given moment, but with the passage of
time, we ask the question again, and the answer differs greatly. Imagine this process of
questioning and answering ourselves as going on every time we change our social
context, and you will see why self-identity becomes fluid. It is not a conscious process,
but rather an automatic one. Up to a certain point, people 'shop' for social roles,
therefore, they discard or recycle identities as one may choose to discard or recycle a
can of soda. Hence, identity has become a kind of performative art and, like all arts, it
has its 'virtuosi'.
The 'virtuoso' of identity is forced to develop larger and more intricate webs of metacultures in order to pursue his/her intellectual potential without the need to refer to
ideology. Indeed, this is the end of the individual as a social being who occupies a
place in society and the beginning of a new individual who can 'be' and is allowed to
defend his/hers cultural differentiation without the backing of social institutions. This is to
say, social institutions are obsolete. Nowadays, the individual can claim his/her rights to
be 'different' by sheer virtue of Meta-cultural affiliation.
Yet, Meta-Cultural affiliation carries a risk which is also its main asset: fluid
performance. This is to say, one may chose an identity (or a series of identities), but in a
Sartrean existentialist kind of way, one may or may not choose to perform his/her
identity in the same way twice. In fact, more often than not, we perform that identity as a
'theme, fugue and variations'. Our identity becomes an exercise in creativity. It becomes
fluid (if not fuguic).
Shared identity becomes a meeting of those who we perceive to be like us, thus
allowing us to lower our barriers without realising that up to a certain point, the act of
identifying us with others is a counterfeit act. A 'false performance of identity', this is
because by identifying us with others we stop seeing the 'other' as 'other', we perceive
him/her as part of us, which, in the long run, allows us to maintain the illusion of a
perceived identity. But on the short term, makes the task of expelling pretenders to our
communal meta-identity an end in itself rather than the means to an end.
The "Myth of the Eternal return": Time, Meta-Culture and Fundamentalism
The myth of the eternal return is comprised of three basic concepts: time (as both,
history and the negation of history), self and home. Home is linked to culture, culture is
linked to identity and identity is linked to self, hence home and self can be considered
as one and the same. .
Although humans, as social animals, are aware of history, they are also aware that
time is cyclical, and the passage of time is what 'makes history'. Yet history 'as it
happened' is not something that we like, we prefer to ignore 'real history' and re-create it
in a form which will satisfy our communal ego. To do this we have to project us unto a
mythical 'time out of time', when the ceremonies, rites and practices that we perform
now were still 'ideal' in nature, when they were not yet tainted by familiarity. People,
objects, places and actions have no intrinsic value except for the fact that some of them
participate in a kind of transcendental reality. Every meaningful activity, then, becomes
a ritual to transport the past into the present. Furthermore, every activity performed by a
group validates the group as 'the only group'.
For the purpose of simplification, Culture can be defined as the customs, practices,
ideologies and traditions of a certain collective of people (i.e., it is what people really
are, what separates their life-style from any other collective). Meta culture, on the other
hand, is what conforms and confirms their identity, it is what they believe they are.
Meta-culture, by virtue of being 'that which goes beyond culture' is in constant motion...it
is movement imposed upon movement, upon movement, ad aeternam.
Extremism fixes movement (if only for a brief period of time) because it imposes a rigid
understanding of culture, thus, it attempts to fix the fluidity which is one of the principal
characteristics of meta-culture.
Fundamentalism is also an attempt to fix fluidity insofar as it is an attempt to go back to
the fundaments of (a) culture. But the aforementioned fundaments are a meta-cultural
construct, created and/or reinterpreted from posterior practices and beliefs in order to
make them look as if they had been always there. Therefore, extremisms and
fundamentalism are both, an attempt to fix fluidity, but both attempts are based upon a
construct, hence, at best, they are constructions themselves, at worst, they are blatant
lies. Nevertheless, extremism and fundamentalism appear as attractive choices to a
sector of the population who is tired of the difficulty that meta-culture entails (i.e. living
with too many choices).
We have to see identity as shape-shifting in nature. It remakes the self in a fixed
way, like still frames in a film; when all the still frames are passed in rapid succession,
they give the illusion of movement, but we know that the aforementioned movement is
an optical illusion. Yet, whilst we wouldn't consider the film to be a single still frame,
there is a tendency for individuals to inhibit the constant creation of identity-frames
(ergo, the perceived movement that constitutes self-identity) in a desperate attempt to
fix a given choice of identity (a still frame, so to speak) in time and space, and whilst this
links us to the myth of the eternal return, it also links Extremism and fundamentalism
(attempts both to fix the fluid existence of identity) with nihilism insofar as they both
advocate the destruction of culture 'as it is' without presenting a valid and/or viable
alternative, on the contrary, they present us with an 'ideal' alternative. The problem is
that idealism is unpractical and un-pragmatic.
Religious identity and fundamentalism
There is an obvious link between religious faith and identity. Yet religious faith and
dogma are supposed to be immutable whilst modern society characterises itself for its
mutability. Hence, when modernity asks from people to adapt their sacred scriptures
and practices to the new times, what it is really asking, is for people to acknowledge the
fact that religions ought to change with the times. This is the price to pay for inclusion in
a global system and a multicultural society. Yet, whilst many are willing and happy to
adapt their religious tenets to the times, a few are not. They use religion as a regressive
force against globalisation. The curious thing, however is that this religious regressive
groups are few in numbers, yet they are given a disproportionate importance in the
media, and they are ascribed a disproportionate power in relation to their numbers...
Indeed, in a modern secular society, religion ought to be marginalised and be subjected
to satire and mockery insofar as the mockery of social institutions is a sign of maturity in
a society. Yet, under the label of 'blasphemy' all mockery, mild irony or even plain
questioning is transformed into 'insult' and suddenly, the fight against 'insult' becomes a
meaning in itself rather than a mean to an end, insofar as fighting against 'insult' allows
for the revitalisation of what is perceived as a dying sign of identity (religion)…
Thus, religion becomes not only a tool for the development of identity, but a way to
assault others with that very same identity. Religion becomes a tool for communication,
although a basic and vindictive one. This is due to the fact that globalisation
homogenises culture, but allows for the maintenance of independent identities...since
religion, (although often fundamental in the creation of identity) is considered as being
part of 'culture', globalisation creates a fear, the fear of religion's death. As a result,
people either try to adapt religion to fit into a global system, or consistently refuses to
expand religion outside the narrow view of the few, both cases have a potential for
'involution'. Indeed, in the former, religion may become a hollow tusk, where only
external appearances and rituals are maintained without belief or meaning...on the
latter, religion becomes the only real aspect of identity that matters, yet by refusing
religion to evolve, they impede identity to develop in any other way...thus, identity
becomes a hollow tusk.
Furthermore, we seem to speak about fundamentalism as if it was a category of crosscultural analysis, yet it is, at best, a conglomerate of disparate phenomena, (religious,
ideological and otherwise). It was first used by mainline protestant and charismatic
Christian sects as an aggressive movement which attempted to fight what was
perceived as the liberal takeover of the state. Yet, nowadays, fundamentalism has
become almost a synonym with Islam (perhaps due to our dependence from oil
produced in mainly Islamic countries).
Whilst at the beginning, fundamentalism was seen as a proud adjective in order to
depict what its adherents saw as 'the return to the fundaments of the faith' (mainly in the
fight against Darwinian Theory in schools), nowadays is plagued with negative
connotations. People see fundamentalism as a desperate attempt to cling to premodern ways of thinking and acting. Yet, this fear of modernity is a falsehood. Indeed,
fundamentalist revivals are linked to contemporary socio-political discourses. It is not
only a response to liberalism, or western cultural and economic imperialism, but also an
attempt to change trends in the respective societies which are seen at odds with their
own ideologies.
Furthermore, contrary to the popular perception, fundamentalism is not such a
widespread phenomenon as it seems at first glance. Its main adherents are a few,
mostly belonging to the middle classes, and mostly educated. In fact, fundamentalism is
the rejection of authority (be it the state, or the church) and the attempt to install another
kind of authority which, is perceived, will not compromise old tenets with the adoption of
new trends. Yet this does not mean the rejection of modernity and/or technology,
neither it means a tendency to irrationality. Indeed, modernity and reason are
maintained by fundamentalists by means of a complex relation with text and scriptures
which are seen as the ultimate authority, yet it is their (the fundamentalists) own
interpretation which is favoured. This is due to the fact that texts and scriptures are seen
as constitutive of a particular and almost exclusive identity which has to set itself aside
from the rest in order to avoid contamination. Yet this 'exclusivity' is, at once, the
greatest triumph and the greatest undoing of fundamentalism when political power is
sought after, because the realm of politics is a realm of compromise and
fundamentalism cannot, by definition, believe in compromise.
Fundamentalism is based upon a 'a-historic' view of society (linked, to the myth of the
eternal return) born out of a projected inferiority complex, where fundamentalists project
their ‘weakness’ unto the image of their country and rationalise this weakness as being
the by-product of corruption due to compromise.
Fundamentalism and Violence
Violence is intrinsically linked to the formation and transformation of religious identities
insofar as the submission of the self to a ‘something’ beyond and/or higher than us is, in
itself, an act of violence not only because of the surrendering of the self, but also insofar
as it separates us from the 'reality' of everyday life and brings us into the realm of 'faith'
which plans to conquer and transfigure reality as it is now to bring forth the kingdom of
god (the gods). Thus, religious submission is not only an act of violence against the self,
but also it brings the threat of a massive act of violence against the world, in the future.
Conclusion
An essential notion of identity always assumes that there is a sense of stability. Thus,
an individual commits to a coherent form of life. Identity is a kind of fixed point of
thought and being. A critique of an essential notion of identity can be found in different
traditions of thought such as symbolic interactionism which treats the notion of cultural
identity/identities as a dialectical relationship along two vectors which operate
simultaneously, namely the vector of similarity and continuity and the vector of
difference and rupture. Identity, on the one hand, is defined by a shared culture. On the
other hand, identities are not fixed but, rather, they are framed in discourses and
practices in multiple but sometimes contradictory ways.
Whilst the adoption of some type of identities can be optional due to their symbolic
meaning (as in religious or cultural ones) because they may be invoked when and in the
ways one wish to, others are forced upon us, as in the case of race. Furthermore,
membership of a group entitles one to participate in the culture and politics of the group,
but it also involves obligations. Such as the adherence to particular scripts of behaviour
which may test the individual to the limits of his/her resistance. Indeed, continuous
pressure to be like the others may provoke a backlash and cause the individual to
forsake the group. As a result, many individuals who claim to belong to a group, do so
by identifying themselves with the group only partially, they adopt a kind of 'liminality', by
continuously negotiating their position inside the aforementioned group
A Meta-Culture is the creation (consciously or otherwise) of a 'bigger culture', be it
national, global or diasporic, made differentiated by a combination of certain factors
such as class, ethnicity, sexuality, regional, rural or urban space or even artistic taste.
The combination of some or all of this factors develop a sense of unity inside several
individuals who do not participate entirely in the total cultural complex, but rather
fragment their participation to population segments grouped according to different
characteristics, such as sex, gender, age, class, occupation, region, etc. Since all of the
aforementioned sub-divisions have different norms of conduct, it is obvious that the
individual cannot be considered as a member of a culture, but has to be understood as
belonging to several Meta-cultural units at once, which creates a sense of fluid identity
Fluid identities are divided alongside superficial patterns of belonging and
consumption, but they also provide with a wider range of tools to solution everyday
problems, insofar as different Meta-cultures have different established methods from
where to choose solutions to different contexts.
Culture is normally linked to ideology. So is Meta-Culture insofar as cultural texts and
practices present a distorted image of reality by either given too much meaning to them,
or by refusing to acknowledge it (the meaning) and/or by presenting a particular image
of the world.
Some people, when faced with hostility, react by reasserting their cultural difference
which manifests itself in the creation of an imagined idea of 'Meta-Cultural' homeland. It
is, so to speak the re-enacting and re-creating of Eliade's 'myth of eternal return'. Since
for most people 'home' is not a real place, they create a 'Cultural utopia', a Meta-culture
where problems will disappear and acceptation will be real.
The creation of this 'Meta-Cultural' homeland is achieved by investing 'the other' with an
individual's terrors. The problem is that, in cases of religious identity, everyone else
becomes ‘the other’. Fears of dissolution, contamination, pollution, seduction, etc. push
the boundaries of a meta-cultural group and force them to maintain sexual, racial and
cultural dichotomies of self and other in order to keep traditional forms of domination
and inequality. Not so much because it wants to perpetuate them, but because it feels
comfortable with them.