Who will I be today?

Today I read:

‘Twenty-first century dis-ease? Habitual reflexivity or the reflexive habitus’, by Paul Sweetman. The Sociological Review 51 (4): 528-549.

The article contends that identity has become a matter of choice – individuals must now choose their identities from the range of possibilities on offer. Self-identity has become a ‘reflexively organised endeavour (Giddens 1991:5) and ‘individuals must now produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves’ (Beck 1994:13).

This project is not unfamiliar to a certain kind of christianity. It’s probably best described in Romans 12: 1-2 Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform [suschematizo]1 any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.

We were engaged in a continual process of working on the self, which involved resisting all the pressures of contemporary culture (‘the world’) and being remade in the image of Christ. Rom 8:29 For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed [summorphos]2 to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

Although described as transformation, this was not a passive process. It was extremely effortful, both in not conforming to the world, and in striving to attain the quality of union with Christ through the Holy Spirit to allow ourselves to be remade in this way. I remember picturing myself like the branch ‘abiding’ in the vine (John 15) so that the life of Christ would flow through me, and produce the fruit of the spirit. The effort was not directed at producing the fruit, but at the whole process of ‘abiding’ – of submitting thought, emotion and will to God in every moment of the day, a constant yieldedness.

So this idea of working on our identities is not new. The difference is that, now we’re no longer trying to become carbon-copies of Jesus, we have to decide for ourselves what we want to be. O terrifying and invigorating liberty! Instead of only one option, now there is a dizzying array, and how am I to decide who I should be?

So is it all the years of training in the christian ‘technologies of the self’ that has made me susceptible to the late-modern project of self construction? Or would Bourdieu contend that there is something in my upbringing that formed in me a habitus of self-surveillance and self-modification? Could it even be said that this project is one familiar to every woman – the sense of being the continual object of scrutiny, and engaged in a project of making oneself more acceptable to others – mothers, grandmothers, fathers, boyfriends, husbands, employers, other women – and that men are only now having to adopt these regimes and are seething with resentment because their right to ‘be themselves’ is finally being called into question? Which is why girls are now surpassing boys in many areas of achievement, because their reflexive habitus fits them particularly well for the exigencies of late-modernity.



1 from sun: union with + schema: to fashion alike, conform to the same pattern.
2 from sun: union with + morphe: shape, nature, form.