It's Complicated
What I read: You are a network by Kathleen Wallace. Published May 18, 2021.
Scan people’s social media status updates and you’ll often see them post a relationship status. A common status I see is “It’s complicated.”
Urban Dictionary defines the status this way.
One of the options for "Relationship Status" on Facebook. Refers to a couple in an ambiguous state between "friends" and "in a relationship". May also be used to indicate dissatisfaction with an existing relationship.
When I read the article that prompted this post, what came to mind was the it’s complicated status because I think for many of us our relationship to ourselves can get rather complicated. Who are we? How do we identify? Are our identities really good descriptions of ourselves or are they not quite accurate?
I have at various times used different descriptors to define myself. Gay. Liberal. Geek. Kinky. Atheist. Polyamorous. Ambivert. Bookworm. Philosopher. Activist. Writer. Businessman. The list goes on. While I am all of these things and much more, I also don’t feel like I am just these things. Depending on the moment, I might feel like just some of these things or none of them. So, my relationship to myself is indeed complicated.
Plus, words that seek to identify people tend to dabble in the absolute. I say I’m gay, but does that mean I can’t occasionally have sexual relations with a woman? Does that make me bisexual or am I simply an adventurous gay man? I’m an atheist, but if I entertain the notion that no one can with certainty prove a god does or does not exist does that mean I’m really an agnostic?
What about the inevitable changes that take place throughout our lives? Few of the words I currently use to describe myself would have accurately described me in my younger years. Political activism wasn’t on my radar until adulthood. Anyone who met me as a young child would have described me as a steadfast introvert and be shocked at my current stints as an obvious extrovert. I was raised a Catholic and bought into that ideology until later in life coming to grips with my doubts about theism let alone religious ideology.
Life happens. We change. We grow. Or at least I sure hope we change and grow because remaining in the same place throughout our lives is typically a recipe for a rather awful existence.
Regardless, no matter what words you choose to identify yourself, you can probably find exceptions that can make you question who or what you are.
Reading Wallace’s article sparked a sense of validation for the complexity that seems to occasionally make me question my own identity. Rather than view our identities as immutable, singular things, Wallace contends we are instead in reality a network of identities that percolate in a stew of constantly changing body, mind, and social role ingredients.
Wallace points out that philosophers, particularly Western philosophers, have tried to arrive at an essential condition of being a self. Minds far greater than mine such as Socrates, Descartes, and Locke have struggled to determine the immutable condition of self. It’s a noble intellectual pursuit, but perhaps it needs more nuance and expansion to adequately encapsulate the human experience of recognizing and identifying oneself.
All these approaches reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences. On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal. This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity. Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities. The latter are variable in their specificity, but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.
Many philosophers have resisted the long history of reductive approaches to categorizing and identifying people. What has emerged from this pushback is what Wallace refers to as the “network self.” As a counter to the reductive approaches more relational approaches are being embraced.
These views imply that it’s not only embodiment and not only memory or consciousness of social relations but the relations themselves that also matter to who the self is. What philosophers call ‘4E views’ of cognition – for embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition – are also a move in the direction of a more relational, less ‘container’, view of the self. Relational views signal a paradigm shift from a reductive approach to one that seeks to recognise the complexity of the self. The network self view further develops this line of thought and says that the self is relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical, genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a network self. The self also changes over time, acquiring and losing traits in virtue of new social locations and relations, even as it continues as that one self.
In other words, the self is complicated. We’re complex. Life is complex. Society is complex. Our bodies are complex. Our emotions are complex. Everything about us is complex on a micro and macro level. Therefore, how can any one word or phrase truly describe who we are. A network self makes a lot more sense than trying to shove the round peg of self-identification into the square hole of the various bandied about terms of identification.
Perhaps society is beginning to accept these complexities more readily. As but one example from my own LGBTQ community, increasingly the word queer is being used as a catchall phrase used for people from all walks of the Kinsey Scale spectrum (although that scale isn’t as much in favor today) along with others who have created entirely new categories of self-experience for which queer seems to fit better while specifics like gay or lesbian might not.
Identifications also don’t always possess the same weight. Some traits might manifest as more dominant in our lives while others remain in the background only emerging on occasion. My identity as a gay man is rather strong. Much of my intimate social interactions and community work take place within that subset of humanity. For me, it’s a dominant characteristic and identity. My identification as a corporate knowledge worker has been strong for many years, but at 67 years of age as retirement from that life is beginning to show itself on the horizon, I find that identity waning as I consider what the next iteration of my time on the planet will look like and how I’ll identify then.
Another way to look at all of this is that the network self, and indeed life itself, is a process, not a destination or an unchanging fixed thing. In my own life, finally accepting that all of life is a process has proven comforting. I fell prey to binary thinking most of my life until I realized that we must be comfortable with the more nebulous path we’re on being a winding road with many unforeseen forks and that traveling along this road is a process from which we can never escape nor should we want to. With process comes hope for change. With process comes the mechanisms for self-improvement.
Rather than an underlying, unchanging substance that acquires and loses properties, we’re making a paradigm shift to seeing the self as a process, as a cumulative network with a changeable integrity. A cumulative network has structure and organisation, as many natural processes do, whether we think of biological developments, physical processes or social processes. Think of this constancy and structure as stages of the self overlapping with, or mapping on to, one another.
Hopefully this concept is comforting to you. It is for me. That I can accept that my identity is complicated, my self is a network of monumental complexity, and life is an ongoing process, gives me tremendous solace. None of us has the perfect answer to who we are and how we should best navigate through this world. None of us can really grab onto a perfect identity description. At least I don’t think any of us can. I sure can’t.
If more people accepted this network self concept, admitting that their steadfast identities might be founded more on quicksand than cement, perhaps we’d all understand each other and cut each other more slack on both an intimate personal level as well as a broader social level.
The process of self-questioning and self-discovery is ongoing through life because we don’t have fixed and immutable identities: our identity is multiple, complex and fluid.
This means that others don’t know us perfectly either. When people try to fix someone’s identity as one particular characteristic, it can lead to misunderstanding, stereotyping, discrimination. Our currently polarised rhetoric seems to do just that – to lock people into narrow categories: ‘white’, ‘Black’, ‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’. But selves are much more complex and rich. Seeing ourselves as a network is a fertile way to understand our complexity. Perhaps it could even help break the rigid and reductive stereotyping that dominates current cultural and political discourse, and cultivate more productive communication. We might not understand ourselves or others perfectly, but we often have overlapping identities and perspectives. Rather than seeing our multiple identities as separating us from one another, we should see them as bases for communication and understanding, even if partial.
This would be my sincerest hope, that we step away from our rigid identifies and the camps into which they compartmentalize us. Greater self-acceptance of our own complexity should result in accepting the same complexity in others. If enough people in the world came to this mindset, maybe a lot of the strife, anger, and impatience with others would subside. In short, maybe the world would be a better place. Maybe we’d be more comfortable in our own skin. We can try.
Kathleen Wallace wrote a book, The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity, in which she greatly expands on the ideas in her article. I’ve already added it to my reading list.
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