48
see Blommaert & Varis (2012) – it surely helps Hijabistas
to maneuver the field
of conflict and contestation in which their practices are set. As noted earlier, the
hijab is the object of heated debates, and while the Hijabistas clearly violate the
demarcation of ‘hijab versus not hijab’ imposed from within certain branches of
Islam, they also clearly violate public perceptions of Western modernity and
male-female equality.
References
Blommaert, Jan & Piia Varis 2011. Enough is enough: The heuristics of
authenticity in superdiversity. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies Paper 2.
http://www.tilburguniversity.edu/research/institutes-and-research-
groups/babylon/tpcs/
Blommaert, Jan & Piia Varis 2012. Culture as accent. Tilburg Papers in Culture
Studies, Paper 18.
http://www.tilburguniversity.edu/research/institutes-and-
research-groups/babylon/tpcs/
Brenner, Suzanne 1996. Reconstructing self and society: Javanese Muslim
women and “the veil”.
American Ethnologist 23 (4), 673-697.
Entwistle, Joanne 2000. The fashioned body. Fashion, dress and modern social
theory. Cambridge: Polity.
Fadil, Nadia 2011. Not - / unveiling as an ethical practice. Feminist Review 98, 83-
109.
Foucault 1988.
Hall, Stuart 1986. On postmodernism and articulation: An interview with Stuart
Hall. Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, 45-60.
Jones, Carla 2007. Fashion and faith in urban Indonesia. Fashion Theory 11 (2-3),
211-232.
Rimke, Heidi Marie 2000. Governing citizens through self-help literature.
Cultural Studies 14 (1), 61-78.
Rose, Nikolas 1999 (1989). Governing the soul. The shaping of the private self. 2
nd
edition. London: Free Association Books.
49
Chapter 4:
Life Projects and light communities
In line with the discussions in the previous chapters, , we will attempt to sketch
in what follows a realistic and empirically sustainable
research program,
focusing on the actual patterns of behavior that people display as bases, or
indexicals, for defining identities, avoiding a priori categorizations and rejecting
the exclusivity of explicitly identitarian metadiscourses as a research object in
the study of identities. What people explicitly tell about identity is too often a
very poor indicator of, and stands in an awkward relationship with, their actual
identity articulating practices. Instead, we shall focus on observable behavior in
connection to what we can call a micropolitics of identity – the presence and
function of ‘ordering scripts’ in which various micro-practical features are
brought into line with each other, and together, as an orderly ‘package’, create
recognizable meanings.
In what follows, we will describe such practices and the orderly way in which
they occur as “life projects”. Adding to this, we will then suggest to view the
specific kinds of ‘groupness’ that emerge from such practices as “focused but
diverse”. Both notions will be introduced here in their most sketchy forms and
without much reference to existing literature – the attempt here is to incite
discussion and hypothesis testing through research, and even blunt and
unfinished notional or analytic tools can be helpful in this process.
Life Projects
In earlier chapters, we emphasized (a) that contemporary identity work revolves
strongly around consumption, as predicted half a century ago by Marcuse (1964);
(b) that identity work, oriented towards ‘authenticity’, appears to involved
complex ‘dosings’ of emblematic features; (c) within a rather narrow bandwidth
of difference. Marcuse argued that identities are dislodged from the ‘grand
politics’ of submission to or revolt against the political and economic system.
Identities defined by orientations to specific commodities are thus depoliticized
identities, identities that refer only to themselves and not to larger power
structures.
Our earlier chapters responded, we think, to this line of argument in three ways:
(a) the ‘grand politics’ has not truly left the orbit of identity, but has been
replaced by a micropolitics of “care of the self” that connects it in different ways
to larger-scale political relations and social structures (Foucault 2007); and (b)
this means that rather than depoliticization, we observe intense forms of
repoliticization, oriented towards multiple, often ephemeral and temporary, but
nonetheless compelling patterns of order, now dispersed over a vast terrain of
everyday behaviors; (c) leading to limited forms of agency within a general
structure of submission, perhaps aptly captured by the notion of “prosumer”:
while submitting to the orders of consumption, people do produce something
new, specific and unique – “culture as accent”. These three points are the takeoff
position for what follows.
50
Let us consider two ordinary examples
of contemporary advertisement, both
referring to automobiles. Figure 1, a Mercedes Benz ad, projects the purchase of
a car onto “a belief”. Note that in the ad, the car itself is not visible: we just see
the iconic sign of the brand; what dominates the ad is the statement that buying
a Mercedes Benz – any Mercedes Benz – is more than the purchase of a useful
object: it is the purchase of a mythologized object (in the sense of Barthes 1957),
an overdetermined object that bespeaks a vision, a set of ideals, a particular
attitude in life. Purchasing a Mercedes Benz means buying an identity, and when
you drive this vehicle, you express that identity (or so it is suggested).
BMW takes another route in Figure 2. Here, the object – the car – is connected to
the role of a father and his relationship with his children. The connection with
(gendered!) identity is explicit here: “How do you become ‘best daddy in the
world’?” The answer: by buying a BMW. You will “impress his friends” and make
your child so happy.
Figure 1: Mercedes Benz advertisement