only conditional, lodged in contingency, but
divested of any transcendental authority it be-
comes little more than the effect or ‘bearer’ of
a social structure. ‘Self-hood’ thus does not
derive from any faculty held in the mind, but
via the mechanism of ‘interpellation’; that is, by
those ideological processes that on the one
hand ‘speak to us’ or ‘hail us into place’ as
the social subjects of particular discourses
and, on the other, produce us as subjects that
can ‘speak’ and can be ‘spoken’. To this novel
understanding of identity must be added the
impact of Freud on twentieth-century Western
thought. Indeed, if Freud’s original ‘discovery’
of the unconscious put paid to the humanist
project of the self-knowing individual, later
psychoanalytic theorists, such as Jacques
Lacan, insist on identity as unresolved and
irresolvable: not something that evolves organ-
ically or intentionally from inside the core of
cognitive being, but via a struggle that charts
the infant’s difficult entry into various systems
of symbolic orders, including language, cul-
ture and sexual difference. For Lacan, the
agony of this ‘entry’ not only leaves the subject
always divided in itself (the perception of
wholeness being, for Lacan, as for Althusser,
only an ‘imaginary’ or fantasized pleasure),
but maintains this improper fit as an initial
and continuing experience. Psychoanalytic-
ally, then, we should speak not of identity as
something achieved or achievable, but ofiden-
tificationas an always imaginary search for the
image of a resolved self (seepsychoanalytic
theory).
With the de-centredsubjectlocated as the
unstable core of modern and late-modern
thought, identity is not only exposed as a so-
cial and psychic process, but is posed as a
political problem (Pile and Thrift, 1995).
With the growth of cultural studies in the
1970s, it is deployed not only a critical tool
useful in the analysis of cultural forms, but as
an active site of conflict and resistance within
social relations fractured by divisions ofgen-
der,classandrace. Energized by the ferment
of ideas produced by the late 1960s – the
counter-culture, civil rights, feminist, anti-
colonial and anti-war movements (see
feminism) – the ‘politics of identity’ emerged
to mobilize new, and hitherto untheorized,
individual and collective possibilities. While
very different kinds of identity were examined
(from working-class to sexual and gendered
identities; from racial to generational iden-
tities), such analyses were determinedly com-
mitted, with a distinctively autobiographical,
reflexive and strategic charge. The dialogue
between identity and the ‘politics of location’
was to become key, especially within debates
of how affective investments in the idea of a
home(land) relate to the resources of history,
language and culture in the production of sub-
jective and collective allegiance. Thus various
theorists (Gellner, 1983; Renan, 1990 [1882];
Balibar, 1991b; Hall, 1992a) explored the
ways in which identities relate to the (relatively
modern)inventionof thenation, which they
invite us to read less as a political or territorial
site than as the particular expression of cultural
tradition; as an articulation of communal
belonging sustained as much by myths of origin
and homogeneity as it is by the supposed con-
tinuities of character, value and custom. From
this perspective, national identity is decisively
not a primordial gift of birth, nor even a coin-
cidence of geographical location, but the willed
incorporation into an ‘imagined community’
(Anderson, 1991 [1983]), a fiction continually
formed and transformed by the narratives, and
counter-narratives, of its telling.
By the late 1980s, this account was given
fresh prominence with the explosion of post-
colonial theory (see post-colonialism),
which sought, amongst other things, to decon-
struct the unity of the sovereign self written
into European knowledge, theory and history.
If at one end of the spectrum modern Western
nations have produced stories of familial mem-
bership in order to negotiate internal contra-
dictions (Matless, 1988; Cresswell, 1996) or
exercise forms of territorial expansion
(Daniels, 1993; Driver, 2001a), at the other
end conscious assertions of identity have been
mobilized as a strategy of resistance for those
dispossessed by the legacy ofempire(Blunt
and McEwan, 2002). Yet – as in fantasies of
the ‘whole’ self of which Lacanian psycho-
analysis speaks – this often releases a regressive
desire to reclaim the (lost) integrity of a ‘local’
or national particularity as a way of negotiating
the competing pressures of existent and emer-
gent multiplicities. In this context, identity
means not only the aspiration to Selfhood,
but the assumption of a fictive Otherness.
Having no positive meaning, but positioned
within a field of differences, identity thus en-
tails discursive work: the binding and marking
of symbolic boundaries, the defining of iden-
tity by what it produces as its negative excess
or ‘constitutive outside’. The crucial point,
however, is not simply that identity derives its
distinction from what it is not. More precar-
iously, the ‘Other’ returns to breach the fore-
closure that we prematurely call ‘identity’
(Butler, 1990).Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_I Final Proof page 365 31.3.2009 7:05pmIDENTITY