Identity and social function

The confusion between identity and social function creates hierarchies that limit our exchanges. Recognizing the multiplicity of our identities allows us to emancipate ourselves from rigid assignments and enrich our relationships, benefiting both the individual and the collective.

On the confusion between identity and function

In a gathering among friends, some people, when introducing themselves to others, immediately ask those they don’t yet know to introduce themselves by their social function. I always feel quite uncomfortable in this type of situation; I find that it creates, whether we want it or not, an immediate social hierarchy that hinders the potential for exchanges between those present. In most professional meetings, intended to build projects, establish partnerships, or share collective intelligence, most often the meeting begins with a round table of social functions, each person expressing themselves as “I am a director,” “I am an administrator,” “I am an artist,” etc.

The “I am” followed by the social function postulates a form of confusion between identity and social function. Perhaps this confusion is only contingent, because one says “I am a director” in the context of a meeting where exchanges and constructions are exchanges and constructions of social functions, so it would be a social identity only in that framework, which in reality for the person would not be confused with their personal sense of identity.

Identity always comes first

Nevertheless, whatever the framework in which we are engaged, whether it be family, friendly, associative, or professional, we are necessarily engaged as a person, with our emotions, and never solely as a social function, because we are indeed there, with our emotions, our sensitivity, our history. We cannot transform ourselves into “social machines,” absolutely reduced to our social functions, although this is a discourse that can often be heard, that we should no longer be ourselves in the professional setting; this authorizes dehumanization, violence, submission, harassment, humiliation... legitimized by virtue of social function. And yet we now know, and have known for a very long time, that taking into account individualities and singular identities, including in the professional context, is essential for the work itself to be more productive, if we place ourselves in a capitalist vision. It will be more so if we better take into account identities, beyond social functions.

How to overcome barriers to human exchanges

In the context of collective intelligence meetings, for example, if people who did not know each other beforehand enter into dialogue based solely on their social function and not on their personal identities, we find that exchanges will be reduced, because unconscious systems of hierarchy in the authorization of one’s own speech are put in place, due to the awareness of social functions. To overcome this barrier, to open up, to create new collaborative openings, we can take the opposite approach and suggest that people who do not know each other be invited to share their personal identities first, in order to be able to exchange on other levels and build other things. And that social functions be known only much later, or not at all. Obviously, this may not work in many contexts (especially when people already know each other), but it is always worth trying, risking this little “social transgression”; it always brings constructive surprises. And even in the case of people who already know each other, engaging in an interaction from a place other than their social function can also open up a lot.
This is practiced particularly in certain work contexts around cultural rights, which greatly advance the capacities of organizations to take into account the dignity of people in their working and organizational methods. The groups that can gather around these issues, who benefit the organizations in which they work, can be brought together without mention of social function. In these cases, we take the opposite approach, and it produces very interesting things, often very deep exchanges.

Identity, retirement, and spaces of legitimation

People in retirement, for example, who are engaged in associative activities: some of them will introduce themselves as “president of association X or Y,” and others will introduce themselves as “retired.” Both are retired, meaning they receive remuneration without needing to work anymore, thanks to the social security system, but they view themselves in their social role very differently. And others who practice liberal professions, such as doctors, who are therefore not employees, or business leaders, may be the same age, and are absolutely not retired. Sometimes, they don’t even have the leisure of being retired, because their professional path doesn’t offer them enough social security. So, at the same age, these people are fully engaged in income-generating activities to cover the necessity of paying their rent and other bills, or out of interest in their activity.
Of course, identity is also shaped in social spaces. I observe this almost daily in the creativity groups I facilitate, in which the benevolent framework put in place and the shared views of others on artistic productions will build and support the identity of each person, thanks to sincere exchanges in a social space. And what needs to be taken into account, so as not to be simplistic in the dialectic between identity and social function, is the multiplicity of social spaces. Social function should be written in the plural, and moreover, identity should also be written in the plural. Thus, a person is defined by multiple identities more or less developed according to social contexts, and thus connected to multiple social functions depending on the different social spaces they traverse, which can also be added or subtracted. Both identity and function are in reality very moving and contextual facts.

Let’s take the example of a person who is very legitimate in a social context, recognized for their skills as an architect, for example, because it’s their profession, who finds themselves once retired in a friendly and family context with people who are uninformed of their social recognition as an architect. Perhaps others will consider themselves better architects than them, when they absolutely are not. And they will have to establish their social function again, justify their capabilities as an architect, their experience, and even their diplomas, to rebuild a social function in a space where they didn’t have it, troubled as they are by not having in that place the recognition acquired through their entire career in other places.

Function as assignment

Up to now, I have discussed the subject of social function in its role of social recognition, but unfortunately, social function can also be an assignment of gender, class, professional hierarchy, which can come, becoming a habitus, as Pierre Bourdieu said, to stifle other facets of our social functions and other facets of our identities.

Troublemakers and violent students

A few years ago, in a middle school where I was having students make films, a place where the teachers were particularly violent (I even had to ask a teacher to leave the classroom once, because he was too violent with the students and blocked any possibility of expression, and moreover was simply causing harm), a relatively turbulent student had declared in a film made by himself: “They say I’m violent but I’m not violent.” He expressed in an absolutely clear way the assignment in which he was enclosed by adults, which indeed made him commit violent acts, because they say he is violent. But he knew that deep down, he wasn’t, that he himself was a prisoner of his assignment.

There is another example, which Albert Jacquard used to take: students considered troublemakers in a school, who were changed to a new school with the indication to the new school that they were excellent students. So their assignment was changed, and for some of them, they became students with excellent academic results.
The question of assignments is extremely thorny because, even when an individual wishes to free themselves from assignments to move towards their personal emancipation, if they find themselves caught in a context in which they are assigned to certain functions, they may be forbidden from occupying others.

Disruption of social function

Recently, for example, in the context of a creativity proposal for people with mental disabilities, when I was preparing the room that morning with graphic materials for people to participate in the creation of an “inclusion fresco,” the janitor of the place who was helping me set up the room felt authorized, seeing all this graphic material, to share his personal passion with me. It was also because I had not introduced myself in my social function as an artist, but in my very logistical social function of setting up this room. I wasn’t making a mystery of the fact that I was facilitating this day, but I wasn’t emphasizing a hierarchy, I wasn’t placing myself in a social hierarchy, me as an artist versus him, a simple guardian. And during this setup, he told me about his work as a painter that he had been doing at night for years, extremely invested, and this had been allowed because we had previously talked about much more anecdotal things.

And thus, during the day that followed, this janitor who was present participated in facilitating the workshop, something that was completely unexpected, by sharing his skills, his knowledge; he was able to enrich this social space with his real competencies in terms of graphic art, much greater than mine in certain aspects, and it did him a lot of good, because he was socially recognized for a function other than the one for which he was employed.

I clearly felt within myself, when he began to talk to me about his practice of pictorial creation, that I was placing him in a place of “amateur practice,” with a certain condescension in me, I admit. So I was assigning him solely to his primary identity as a janitor. And gradually, also because I was meeting him in his personal identity, and because I was sympathizing with this person with cultural references extremely different from mine, that I considered that he had things with which he could enrich me, even in artistic terms, that I wasn’t assigning him to something where I necessarily knew more than him, well, gradually, my representation of assignment softened. And I understood that this person actually had very great skills in pictorial practice. Something that was absolutely not apparent at first glance, because the context did not allow it, which is normal. And he was able to express his skills in the exchange with others, and I suppose that, in terms of identity, it legitimized him in his identity as an artist, if only for himself.

And the pleasure of shared creation, which is an emotional pleasure, which has to do with our emotional identity, was beneficial to social construction. Moreover, in this workshop, the graphic productions of each person were displayed on the wall, progressively, building a large collective fresco. Drawing, collage, graphic expression are among the least social things there are, for people who are not “professionals,” because they reveal us in our vulnerabilities. So we are almost naked with our drawing, and these nudities put together rebuilt a magnificent social space that recognized the fragile personal identity of each person.

Multiplicity of identities and functions

The emancipatory opening, which is my intention through this reflection on identity and social function, therefore passes not only through a fine understanding of the multiplicity of social functions and identities with all their overlap, whether it be the narrative identity developed by Paul Ricœur, who postulates that we construct ourselves through narratives that articulate our social roles with our intimate histories, or the multi-belonging that Édouard Glissant develops in Poetics of Relation, to which I feel quite close, which proposes a rhizomatic vision of identity, the individual not being reduced to the different functions they occupy, or finally the existential ethics proposed by Michel Foucault, which has a strong intentionality to consider one’s own life as a work of art, as a perpetual invention to resist rigid and reductive assignments.

Methods for emancipation

But the real subject of my intention to work on emancipation is: how do we do it in our own reality? That’s why I took my example with the janitor-painter. How do we soften our assignments, which we often give ourselves, by the way? How do we always propose openings?

If people have introduced themselves solely on their social function, how do we make a joke and go propose something else? How do we recognize all our value to ourselves and not need to justify ourselves to others, freezing social roles and reducing exchange capacities? But conversely, how do we, in spaces where others would not give us the floor, give ourselves a form of legitimacy to socially authorize ourselves to be able to contribute? But how do we feel entitled to it?

Thus, my proposal is precisely to have all these issues in mind and above all to feel legitimate, whatever the assigned place in which we find ourselves, to propose side steps to open up movement for oneself and for others, because this emancipation that we dare to offer ourselves by taking the side step, we also offer it to others. And in doing so, we do not at all destabilize the balance of the group and the organization. On the contrary, we benefit the system of social organization with better contributions by participants who are more emancipated, more enriching for themselves, for others, and for the collective.