An Immoveable Third Space

What are healthy forms of identity? From the last post, we learned that many individuals root their identity in belief systems found in New Age forms of Eastern traditions. However, they are more coping mechanisms than meaningful belief systems, as they tend to focus on the individual, and eschew notions to community or our relation to it. For this post, I’d like to expand the discussion into highlighting how postmodernity has guided identity construction in a way that has increased a collective “sense of internal fragmentation and chaos,” and propose how we can adapt to modernity while staying resilient to its juggernaut-like momentum (Mansfield 2; Giddens).

Self vs. Subject

Before a hypothesis can be formed as to how one can create a selfhood that feels coherent and confident, one must acknowledge the self as subject. Nick Mansfield, philosopher and Professor Emiritus of Macquarie University, focuses on “subject” rather than “self” as implicit in the former is “the sense of social and cultural entanglement.”

Moreover, subjectivity encourages us to imagine our interior lives as inevitably “linked to something outside of it,” whether that is an idea, people, societal influences (Mansfield 3). Simply put, “subject, therefore, proposes that the self is not a separate and isolated entity, but one that operates at the intersection of general truths and shared principles” (Mansfield 3). Due to modern and postmodern culture’s “focus on the self,” one can develop a sense of self informed by their maladaptive responses to the culture (Mansfield 1). This can show up as a myriad of distressing sentiments, as people have reported feeling “less confident, more isolated, fragile, and vulnerable than ever” (Mansfield 2).

Relations as Space

Evelyn A. Early in Susan Ossman’s The Places We Share: Migration, Subjectivity, and Global Mobility recounts her trajectory from childhood as a preacher’s kid to her migration throughout the Arab world. Out of the countries she’s resided, she talks fondly of two: “Egypt, the country of my first true love, the boyfriend I did not marry, the home I thought I would establish; Morocco, where I brought my daughter home to live at eight months, and where I returned with her at fifteen years on a second tour to finish out her childhood.” For Early, these places feel like “coming home” (Early 147). What stands out is the relational quality of her epithets – her emotional connections are triangulated by a third party, such as a boyfriend from the past or her daughter. For Early, whose moves are propelled by her career as an anthropologist and diplomat, her migratory lifestyle – even described as “alien” by her brothers – excludes her from tying identity to a singular place or her place of origin. As unsettling this can be, Early finds a strong sense of self in a third space, one which is affixed not to place, but to work.

The Instability of a Work Identity

The phenomenon of affixing identity to work are recounted by Max Weber, who claimed that in a capitalist structure, which is cultivated by Protestant values, one finds worldly morality “through the fulfilment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world” (Weber 40). Though now secularized, the value of interpreting work as a “calling” is still prevalent in postmodern culture (Weber 40). Unfortunately, prevalent in postmodern culture is also job insecurity. When framed alongside the increase of issues in mental health (Ferraro et al.), it is difficult to claim that one’s work, now equated as one’s calling, is a reliable source of identity. What distinguishes Early is the nature of her career. Working as a social scientist required her to create relationships and cultivate empathy. When talking to another anthropologist, she shared that “we are not Moroccan and American but anthropologist and anthropologist” (Early 155). Her third space is another anthropologist, who “hold[s] together the arabesque that is [her] cosmopolitan ‘third space’” (Early 155).

It appears then, that one can approach identity construction with a proactive strategy that dances past the detrimental impacts of modernity. One can cultivate a third space that serves as a haven from modernity’s dynamism and its preclusive emphasis on selfhood. To echo back to Rosa, resonance, or the relationship between one and another, is the answer to modernity’s instability.

Works Cited

Early, Evelyn A. "Trilateral Touchstones: Personal and Cultural Spaces.” The Places We Share: Migration, Subjectivity, and Global Mobility, edited by Susan Ossman, Lexington Books, 2008, 143-160.

Ferraro, Anna M., et al. “Postmodernity, Insecurity and Job Loss Focus on the Unemployed’s Suffering.” Journal of Psychopathology, vol. 23, no. 4, 2017, pp. 145–53. HAL, https://univ-rennes2.hal.science/hal-01988354.

Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. New York University Press, 2000.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge Classics, 2001.