1. Declarative identity: "I am... "
Adam Mars-Jones writes in a review of Claudia Roth Pierpoint's Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books that,
"Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, and has characterised his childhood as that of ‘an all-American boy’."Mars-Jones comments,
"It’s not the obvious way to describe the experience of someone who lived in an almost wholly Jewish enclave of his city, attended Hebrew school three afternoons a week and had grandmothers who spoke only Yiddish"Being "all-American", Mars-Jones continues, is not a demographic category but a psychological one:
"The contradictions of belonging to two groups, in fact to two exceptionalisms (God’s chosen people and, by some reckonings, his country), were not felt as contradictions."Taking a habitus-in-habitat approach, the above quote brings to light different kinds of affiliation: to a Jewish identity, which is ethno-religious - nation as community; and to an American identity, which is territorial-cultural - nation as nation-state. At some level, both are imaginary, yet determinate. This points to (at lest) two kinds of interlocking habitat, two kinds of environment: the de-territorialised (or worldwide-ised) nation and the territorial nation.
Hyphenation deals with this double identity to some extent, Jewish-American, but it does not begin to address the two kinds of interpellation involved, the two kinds of enculturation involved, once at the level of the ethno-urban environment and once at the level of media-ideological environment. These are two kinds of construction, both to a degree fictive, in two kinds of 'media', both to a degree material-cultural; one more directly material and embodied, one more abstract and intellectualised.
2. Process of identification: "I identify with... "
Agnes Poirier (2014, 12 January) writes in The Observer,
"I grew up in a country where the president embodied not just the state but also the nation. He may be a man, but he is also an institution. He is France – in other words, he is me and I am him. We may dislike the human being; we inevitably revere the symbol. Hence the deference – or at the very least, the inherent respect – accorded any French president by his compatriots."This is a very different statement of national identity to that of Roth's "all-American boy". The habitat is always more than the bio-physical environment. It is 'worldly' in an Arendtian sense. A national environment, given both its constructed character and its fictive character, is multiply mediated; and retrospectively, (bio-physical) environments can be understood as media, by means of which the regularity of habitus is rendered more permanent and the conditionality of habitat is rendered engagingly habitual.
Reference
Mars-Jones, Adam (2014). In the egosphere. London Review of Books, 36 (2), pp.9-16. Available at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n02/adam-mars-jones/in-the-egosphere. Accessed on 2 February 2014.
Poirier, Agnes (2014, 12 January). The president, the films star - and the very British fuss about a French affair. The Observer, 12 January 2014, pp.31.
