Searching for the ‘I’ in between.

“To begin with some primordial identity implies at he origin a prodigiously unlikely singularity, or else the obscure mystery of one simple being then dividing for no special reason.”[1]

Introduction.

What you are about to read is an exercise; no warm up what so ever. It deals, or tries to deal, with one of the most ambiguous abstractions I have found so far: identity. Something that we use constantly, live constantly, perceive constantly, modify constantly; however we usually don’t know what is it made of, or even if it is made of something. We nurture and honor it, fight to achieve it and struggle to have it. And even while living by it and for it, we don’t know what it is.

I am not talking about any identity, all identities or one identity, nor referring to it as a generic form that seams to give an account of something. I’m talking about your identity. Yes, you, the reader!

In ‘Reassembling the Social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory’, Bruno Latour contends the term ‘social’. For him ‘the social’ can be used to explain all sorts of things without ever interacting directly with them. Latour claims that it is precisely ‘the social’ what should be explain. And it is by establishing connections between things that are not themselves social, that we can se how ‘the social’ is constituted. In this alternative view he proposes, “’social’ is not some glue that could fix everything including what the other glues cannot fix; it is what is glued together by many other types of connectors.” (Latour 2007: 5)

Following the course of the ‘sociology of associations’, term which is used by Latour to differentiate his approach from the old ‘sociology of the social’, he comes to ask if we hadn’t done with individuality the same we did with the social, that is: to assume that was something already there, which we didn’t have to explain, or to ask about what its constitution was. Borrowing a metaphor from the Web, Latour propose to call these interiorities plug-ins: “When you reach some site in cyberspace, it often happens that you see nothing on the screen. But then a friendly warning suggest that you ‘might not have the right plug-ins’ and that you should ‘download a bit of software which, once installed on your system, will allow you to activate what you were unable to see before.” (Latour 2007: 207) In this manner, plug-ins can be traced. You can know where are they coming from and what is their effect when downloaded and saved.

Plug-ins, interiorities and identities, are what this narrative exercise tries to deal with. What about them? Ok, lets see, according to Latour I download or get a plug-in and then I’m able to see or notice something that I was unable to see before. This plug-in has to be installed in a system. As well, Latour thinks you will sustain this cognitive competences, the ones that the plug-ins have give you, as long as you subscribe to the elements that give you the information. So from one point of view he is suggesting to install the plug-ins in your system; and from the other he is saying that you cannot carry the plug-ins with you because they are not your property: they are supported as long as you have a relation with the outside. This contradiction as we will see, is one that pops out continuously when you try to give an account of an interiority, identity, personality, self, or whatever you want to call it. The ‘I’ to whom we constantly relate to is as amorphous as elusive.

Coming back to the plug-ins and the system again, we could certainly ask for example about the size of the hard drive to see if there is a maximum amount of software that a system can store, something like: how many plug-ins can you have? Or something in relation to the RAM memory and ask about how many plug-ins can you run at the same time?

However what I’m wondering is about the OS, the Operating System itself. Yes, Linux, Windows or Mac, each has its own software. You cannot run plug-ins that are made for Mac if your operating system is Windows and vice versa. Well may be you can because there might be modifications for each other, but then you have the same software adapted specifically for Mac or Windows, the OS still the same! And most important, when using one or the other, discrimination must come into place: the operating system will restrict the amount of possibilities you can choose from. And even if you come with the idea of having a parallel desktop, which as far as I understand, enables you to run both Mac and Windows software, and “enjoy the best of both worlds” as the slogan says, you have different parallel desktop software’s for Mac and Windows, so the system still discriminates. From a Latourian perspective plug-ins are the locus of a disagreement: from one point of view plug-ins needed to be installed into your OS to run, and from another it is suggested that you cannot carry them around with you because they are not your property. This is why, in this text, I will inquire about the OS. I will inquire about this ‘I’ that goes around doing stuff, I will look into identity/interiority/personality/self or as you want to call it. This thing we think is inside of us.

According to Latour “we should be able to observe empirically how an anonymous and generic body is made to be a person: the more intense the shower of offers of subjectivities, the more interiority you get”. (Latour: 208, italics are mine) Hence, the more intense the shower of plug-ins is, the more interiority you get. And just to be sure, this is precisely where the main inquiry of this text is located: if you have an operating system, no matter how intense the shower of plug-ins is, the interiorities you can get will always be mediated by that particular OS. As I said before, the Latourian plug-ins, does not explain if the actor is a blank page or have already an OS who stands in between when the bombarding of subjectivities begin. For him, this bombarding consist of the addition of another flow, “another circuitry, through which plug-ins lend actors the supplementary tools –the supplementary souls- that are necessary to render a situation interpretable”. (Latour 2007: 209) But the question still stands: Do we need an OS?

So, what you will read gather many topics, many speeches, many discussions, and many actors both human and non-human. I interviewed a lot of people. The only methodology I followed was to ask all people the same question: What makes ‘(reader name)’ being ‘(readers name)’? And believe me, it was enough to enter into mined ground. As well, I interview a PhD student who studies the field of memory and Dissociative Identity Disorder, who help me have a better understanding on this complicated topic. Three main texts define the thought line I wanted to follow: Annemarie Mol’s ‘The body multiple’, Bruno Latour’s ‘Reassembling the social’ and Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Trouble’. I saw movies, documentaries and a lot of people in their every day life. The dynamics of identity and identities are extremely complicated to grasp. Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that the final conclusion might come to be a personal believe. In moments of despair, where the text becomes a little bit complicated, you might want to keep in mind that we are looking for the OS I previously mention. Remember that we are trying to understand the plug-ins and the roll they play with identity/interiority/personality/self and so on. About the title: it came to be when I was writing an email to the PhD student who help me understand DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder. “Searching for the ‘I’ in between” refers to the ‘I’ in between the two D’s in DID. The left ‘D’, the Dissociative ‘D’ refers to a body that tries to find as many emotions as possible in its natural flow. The right ‘D’, the Disorder ‘D’, refers to the efforts that are made to regulate and to normalize that free flowing of the body. The ‘I’ in between speaks of a body that is normalized against its natural will to explore and feel. Searching for that ‘I’ comes to be a personal option; what I can only offer here are some elements that might help you understand how I think about it. Remember at all times that this is a quest, and that we are searching for the ‘I’ in between. Here we go!

It was during a lecture of Prof. Hans Harbers’ course ‘On human and non-human’ that the ‘body’ appeared to me as a completely new concept. Harbers was referring to Annemarie Mol’s ‘The body multiple’ and the different ways in which the body is perceived in a hospital, how the perception of the body changes according to the area of specialization in which it is studied. I start wondering about how the same body could be perceived in different ways. If the relations that the experts establish with the body change according to the area of specialization, are the interactions with this body changing as well? And if the doctors interact in different ways according to their specialty, are they looking at different bodies? Or they perceive systems that seamed to be dissociated of the patient’s body?

And what about the patient’s own experience? Are they looking to a different body each time they are moved into another area of specialization inside the hospital, or they have one stable perception of it? I ran to ask Harbers during the pause if Mol’s idea of the body could be extended to identity. If identity changes according to where we are because of its performative characteristic, why do we perceive our identity to be singular? Why do we talk about identity as a stable unit? And why do we perceive it does not change? “Bruno Latour would say Plug-ins!” He said with a smile moving his hands, “the more plug-ins the more identity you get, the more connections you have the more interiority you get”.

So, this is the story of how I came to understand all those things that make me a person. It is the story of bodies that are asked to think about themselves in singular, even when its pluralities erupt like popcorn. It is the story of interiorities that are normalized and asked to be perceived as united. It is about ‘I’, and may be ‘you’.

Since this is the story of the connections I followed to trace the plug-ins, the body and the bodies and the identity and the identities, I will narrate the steps that I took in doing so, chronologically.

Annemarie Mol’s ‘The body multiple’.

After first hearing about ‘The body multiple’, and given all the different questions that came after the brief introduction to it, I start reading this book in order to see if it was possible to extend the physical characteristic of the body and the bodies to the psychological idea of identity or identities. This is what happened:

Annemarie Mol spent four years going once or twice a week to a university hospital, which she refers to as hospital ‘Z’, located in a average-sized town in the center of The Netherlands. She attended the hospital, inquiring about the different practices that went around atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis refers to the thickening of the arteries. It is an inflammatory response that happens in the walls of arteries, and with it follows the reduction of the blood flow and thus a poor oxygen supply to the muscles. The muscles usually hurt.

Mol observed all sorts of different things inside hospital ‘Z’, and even though she followed the voices of patients, it was on how the medical practices came to be that she was really curious about. Thus, the experiences of the bodies of the patients that she narrates are mostly traced by medical practices. In fact, she does not refer to her study as ethnographical, but as praxiographical, wondering about how the practices are built up by the interactions of humans and non-human actors.

A patient is send to hospital ‘Z’ by a general practitioner. The surgeon calls her/him and the patient takes a seat in the consulting room. The doctor goes through the patient’s file, and he picks up the letter of the general practitioner that says Mrs. or Mr. ‘A’ has problems with her/his leg. ‘I used to walk the dog for long stretches, but now I can’t. I hardly can. It hurts too much. “Where does it hurt?” “Here, doctor, mostly down here, in my calf it does. In my leg.” (Mol 2002: 22)

The doctor asks how many meters she can walk before the leg starts hurting: some fifty meters she answers. The doctor looks at the leg that hurts, checks the color of the skin and touches the patient’s arteries, and he tries to feel whether or not the arteries pulsate with each heartbeat. Perhaps the surgeon felt bad pulsations in several arteries; ‘the surgeon makes a phone call to check if the vascular laboratory is available, writes a note requesting the technician to check arm and ankle pressure of both legs, hands this note to the patient, and says: “Please, come back here afterwards.”’ (Mol 2002: 58) The technician will measure the blood pressure of both arm and ankle and write down some numbers. They will be compared. Pain when walking and pressure drop might be related. The patient might or might not revive further treatment.

What about all this? Well, we can say that a disease is being done. A disease does not stand-alone and by itself. ‘It depends on everything and everyone that is active while it is being practiced’ (Mol 2002: 32): measures, notes, stethoscopes, conversation, walking distance, touching, X-rays, microscopes, doctors, patients, legs etc are the elements that make a disease to be. A disease is looked at from a different point of view according to the location inside the hospital: the consulting room, the pathologist’s laboratory, the clinical department, the technician room etc.

‘No, pathologists do not make the thick atherosclerotic vessel walls they look at, nor do they construct them’. […] ‘When a disease is being done, we may say that it is performed in a specific way.’ (Mol 2002: 32) Performed without suggesting that there is a backstage ‘where the real reality is hiding’. (Ibidem) What Mol proposes is to shift from an epistemological to a praxiographic inquiry into reality. Perhaps, as she says, is better to say that in practices objects are enacted: ‘in the act, and only then and there, something is- being enacted.’ (Ibidem)

“The body multiple that ensues does not fit within an Euclidean space. In the textbook body –the single virtual body onto which various variants of atherosclerosis to be projected– smaller parts join together to form larger wholes. A cell is part of a tissue, tissues compose an organ, organs make a body, bodies form a population, and populations are part of an ecosystem. The precise character of the relations between the parts and what encompasses them is a matter of controversy, but however fierce the debates about this, they are based on a share conviction: that reality is singular.” (Mol 2002: 119)

Unfortunately, I do not read in Mol’s ‘The body multiple’ the relationship patients have with their own bodies. Yes, of course she talks about stories that let us know about how atherosclerosis is experienced by the patients in their on-going life. But how do they perceive their own body? While pathologists, technicians, surgeons and epidemiologists relate in different ways to the something called ‘body’, a body that in practice is multiple, do patients experience the body as a singularity in each are of the hospital? Or is the patient looking at different bodies? Is it the same body at home, than in the consulting room? Is it perceived as a different body in the technician’s room? What about the body that can no longer walk the dog? Or the body is perceived as fragmented and what cannot longer walk the dog is not the body but the leg that hurts? Is it a dissociated body or does it have a unity? Is it experience as a singularity or as a multiplicity?

From the medical practice of atherosclerosis, the body might be a multiplicity, in which elements are being compared to one another: the dissociated body is reassembled to give an account of a disease. The patient, the body, the leg, the artery, the dissection of the artery and the cells are reconstructed and build up again. Mol’s praxiological study follows atherosclerosis from actions: the measures, notes, conversations, walking the dog etc, and while doing so all sort of element’s and their interactions can be traced. Nevertheless, the experience of the patients toward their own body is left alone.

What I was wonder about at this point was if the body, from the patient’s point of view, is perceived as a multiplicity or as a singularity? Is it composed of various elements than can be traced? Or is it perceived as a unity that does not allows it fractionation? How do we perceive our body? Do we perceive our body to be a fixed composition or as one that changes? Thus I started asking around. I start asking people how they perceive their body and if the perception changes according to the circumstances.

My inquiry was following three main perspectives to talk about the body: Mol’s ‘The body multiple’, Bruno Latour’s idea of plug-ins and how an anonymous and generic body is made to be a person in the book ‘Reassembling the Social’, and Judith Butler’s perspective about gender as a perfomative feature, which holds an implicit relation with the body in the book ‘Gender Trouble’. We will come later to the last two, but for now let me explain how the next step in this process came to be.

First, from Mol’s perspective, at least in the medical practice of atherosclerosis, the body is perceived in different ways. The relation that doctors enact with the body of the patients might differ according to all sorts of factors in hospital ‘Z’. There is no unity of a body until it is brought together again, until it is reassembled; nevertheless, the perspective of the body from the patient’s point of view was unknown, and was something I could ask about. Second, Bruno Latour’s idea of interiority and plug-ins explain how a body, any body, comes to be a person because of a fully traceable gathering of subjectivities. Thus the idea of being born as a human being or being molded into society by a superstructure is rejected and transformed into one that can follow a fully artificial and fully traceable aggregate of interiorities. Third, Butler’s idea of the performative resembles in some ways the Latourian actant and the Molsian idea of enactment. Butler says: ‘acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are peformative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.’ (Butler 2007: 185)

It is important to notice that Mol, Latour and Butler follow certain connections in relation to a ‘body’: a body that was studied according to practices and fragmented, and came to have a disease through enactment; a body that is made to be a person because of the ‘shower of offers of subjectivities’ (Latour: 208); and a body that allows acts, gestures and desires to be experienced as an internal characteristic: ‘that the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality.’ (Butler 2007: 185)

While Annemarie Mol enables the questions about how the patients might perceive their own body to arise, her dissection of atherosclerosis and the practices that encompass it, showed how the disease comes to be in the act, how through the diverse practices a disease is being enacted. As well Latour and Butler were bringing some type of correlations to the answers I was hearing. Yes, the kind actors who share their thoughts about themselves with me usually perceive their interiorities to be changing. They thought they were different persons according to where they were or with who they were. Thus ‘B’ thought he was a different person when he was with his girlfriend, than when he was with his friends. People thought that they changed according to circumstances. They said they experience having identities that were adapting and fluctuating according to the different contexts in which they were. If ‘C’ is sometimes a football player, sometimes a bar tender, sometimes a boyfriend, sometimes an uncle, sometimes a son, sometimes a lover, sometimes a friend, and he is as such because the way he perform in all different circumstances, why should we think that the body is perceived as one? Why should we think that we have the same identity in different circumstances? If a body does not have an ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality, and if this reality is constantly changing, constantly being reframed, why should we think that the body even has an ontology which constitutes it in the same way for every different situation? When does having multiple personalities become a disorder?

The ‘I’ in between the two D’s.

DID stand for Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder). According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), which is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides an standardization of the criteria for the classification of mental disorders, the Dissociative Identity Disorder ‘is characterized by the presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states that recurrently take control of the individuals behavior accompanied by an inability to recall important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness. It is a disorder characterized by identity fragmentation rather than a proliferation of separate personalities.’

According to the DSM-IV-TR, in DID there is a failure to integrate aspects of identity, memory and consciousness. Each personality is experienced as having its own personal history, a characteristic self-image, an identity and a name. These personalities can emerge in particular situations, and may have different age, gender, knowledge and a predominant emotion, which differentiate them one of the other. These identities may take control in sequence, and may deny knowledge of one and the other, or appear to be in open conflict. The time to switch from one identity to another usually takes a matter of seconds, however less frequently may be gradual.

Myths, disagreements, misunderstandings and discussions about DID seam to be more than frequent among psychiatrists, psychologists, and almost every one who studies it. Controversies about its origin, diagnosis, treatment and existence are vast. Though few, people are diagnosed with DID.

The most famous case of DID is ‘Sybil: The true and extraordinary story of a woman possessed by sixteen separate personalities’ a book that later became a well known movie. The story of Sybil is related to her early tortuous childhood. When having certain memories about her past, or experiencing moments that seam to be unbearable to her for unknown reasons, she changes in many ways. She has different personalities; all of them pose a different body and have specific characteristics. In the movie, the same body enacts the different personalities; this body is around thirty years old. The cure came from a process that took eleven years. Through hypnosis, the doctor is able to tract each personality and the supposed traumatic events that took place in an early childhood. Sybil is “free at last” as the voice of the doctor says while the camera fade out, when she is able to merge and accept all her identities into one body.

There are two particular ideas I would like to touch: the idea of the etiology of DID and that of trauma. As well as in the movie ‘Sybil’, there is a tendency to connect the origin of the DID with childhood trauma: “’Never in the history of psychiatry’, declare Richard Loewenstein, the president of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation (ISSMP&D), in 1989, ‘have we ever come to know so well the specific etiology of a major illness’.” (Sinason 2002: 40) Nevertheless several studies “question the relation between dissociation and specific aspects of abuse, or even whether a history of sexual abuse should be consider the specific etiology of dissociative disorder.” (Ibidem) Even though there seams to be a relation between childhood trauma and later dissociative disorders, “many studies had failed to control for other contributing pathogenic factors that could explain this association”. (Sinason 2002: 41)

But what is a trauma? How does something becomes traumatic?

Pierre Janet, who was a French psychologist, gave the first trauma-based model of dissociation, ‘similar in many ways to the work of Freud and Breuer in Studies on Hysteria published a few years later.’ (Sinason 2002: 37) After a brief period of popularity, along with William James and Morton Prince, he was largely forgotten. “’Freudian theory has flooded the field like a full rising tide, wrote Morton Prince, ‘and the rest of us were submerged like clams buried in the sands at low water’.” (Sinason 2002: 38) The concept of trauma developed by Janet was very different to those we usually refer now days, and “Janet was quite clear (indeed this was one of his disagreements with Freud) that sexuality was not central to the dissociative process” (Sinason 2002: 40) It is not the purpose here to discuss the Freudian conceptualization of trauma, nevertheless we have evidence to claim that Freud was looking for the connections which could relate to the idea of trauma, and those connections were much more than sexual. In fact, Freud at the end of his life was worried about the misunderstandings and misconceptions that had been generated in relation to the infant’s sexual life.[2] Even though modern literature on DID is flooded with ideas about the relation of trauma and sexuality as I had say, it is important to see that Janet’s idea explicitly connect trauma with for example: “two men hidden behind a curtain who jump out and frighten a 7-year-old girl” (Ibidem) which seams to be an episode dislocated from the sexualized paradigm.

Let me make an example on what is known as identity development to go further on the idea of trauma. The father of a family abused his stepdaughter sexually over a number of years. When she turned 16 years of age he ran away with her, they got married and had seven children. The family was well known by social services because of the poor standards of care given to the children; they went to school poorly clothed with inappropriate shoes, clothing suitable for summer in the winter months. The children were often dirty, late for school or absent without reason. The oldest daughter ran away when she was 18, and eventually starts to speak about what was happening in the family. Children were made to be sexual with each other, and were abused regularly by both parents, they were videoed and abused by a ring of 30 adults, she alleged. The parents were prosecuted and the children removed into care. They confirm the story told by their sister. They revealed a family atmosphere of extensive oppression, multiple sadistic and sexual abuses in an atmosphere of threat and violence.[3] As I read the description of each child, their behavioral patterns, attachments, emotional life and sense of self, every thing seems ok according to their family history. Every thing falls under a normal spectrum from an inside the family view: children were acting coherently in foster care; they were acting according to the normal standards in which they grew up. Let me explain. Cathy was 7 years old, in foster care she made calculated sexualized advance to men and women, she rubbed against people, and whenever she saw her siblings she made sexualized contact with them. She could be friendly and vivacious, but she could behave defiantly as well. She saw herself as a sexual object, desirable, and if rejected become upset. Her sister Barbara, who was 13 years old, was preoccupied about love relations with her peers at school. “She rapidly sexualized such relations to a degree which was uncomfortable and embarrassing for boys of a similar stage of development who did not have the maturity and understanding to respond to the sexualized behaviour.” (Sinason 2002: 33) As I read through the description of the case, I find that Barbara became confused about the reasons they where in foster care and not with their family.

What if all of us have sexual relations with our parents and our sisters/brothers? What if the standard of ‘family’ was similar to that depicted here? Then we would say that the boys who were embarrassed at school by Barbara’s sexualized behavior are not normal.

And you will probably say: “yes? and what about the daughter/sister who ran away”. Yes, you are right, ab-normality is unveiled when it is compared to other types of normalization; these children had contact with the outside world.

But that’s exactly the point I want to make: an experience becomes traumatized when it is measured and compared to a standard. Trauma is created along with normalized practices. If airplanes were usually colliding against skyscrapers, 9/11 and the Twin Towers would not had been a traumatic event, and we wouldn’t be talking so much about PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

An event that disrupts an interiority of a person that has being normalized, becomes traumatic because of that which has being normalized is disrupted.

You are standing quietly behind a door, you hear you friend approaching, and suddenly you come out and shouting “buuu!” He got scared. He shouts back or kicks you in the knee because the practice hasn’t being normalized. It is a traumatic event because of its unusual characteristic.

I can say that the family of the case study I described does not fall under the usual standard. And I could even make a moral judgment about it. But I’m afraid that the moment morality arises, normality is being taken for granted. And that’s exactly what this exercise is about. About tracing that which has being taken for granted since it has being normalized.

Normative and normality stand close together. It is because we had normalized a sense of identity, that having multiple ones becomes a disorder, normatively speaking. It is said that ‘the sense of self arises through the reinforcement by parents providing good enough care, and responding to communicative needs and feelings. Out of this a positive view of self develops a description of self as worthy of care and love, with associated positive attributions’. (Sinason 2002: 31) But isn’t this description containing already a normalized argument? It is already giving for granted that a good sense of self with positive attributions develops through a normative assumption. The good and the bad are such because they are standing on normative ground.

The question is can we being not normalized persons?

I believe that a sense of self, identity or personality, all of them interiorities, are developed by normalization, we get used to be from repetition. But what is this normalization made of? Well you have to go and look for yourself to find the connections. I will give you a nice example that describes the idea of normalization and the ‘interiorization’ I am talking about. In ‘Daddy is a Martyr’, a documentary available on the Internet at Tegenlicht.vpro.nl, the portrait of a Muslim family is shown. The father/husband died as a martyr, which means he died fighting in the front line of Jihad. He was a mujahid, he was a commander for the army. Hezbolah, the “Party of God”, normalize through a number of actions that are showed in the documentary ‘the martyr’. The wife refers to her dead husband as “the martyr”, she talks with her daughters and son about their father, but she calls it “the martyr”. She asks her son if he wants to be a martyr like his father. He answers yes. The identity of the martyr is created and normalized trough the repetition of the concept in a number of different places and in many different ways: there is a celebration in the town of the martyr’s origin to commemorate its dead, there is a dinner for the families that is paid by Hezbolah with the purpose to celebrate and remember the martyrs, there are billboards with the faces and names of the martyrs at the entrance to their town of origin, social workers make visits to the families of the martyrs to help them, in their very particular way, to deal with the lost, but they as well help in bringing the image of the martyr alive through the induction of mourning. A miraculous tree is showed. After a while of being cover, a tree where the names of the martyrs written in wood pieces were hanged, leafs start growing in the tree, one leaf for each martyr it is said. It is a miracle that the martyr’s have done. Commemorate and remember: the more the martyr is connected to each person in as many ways as possible, the more the person becomes used to the idea of ‘the martyr’; it is through a persuasive process of normalization/habituation, that persons become used to the image of the martyr. As I showed to you, the normalization of the martyr is made of very different things; things that you can trace and connections you can follow.

To resume briefly we can say that DID describe a state in which a person’s identity is fragmented. Different identities help to deal with different situations: the identity that is more suitable to cope with the ongoing experience will emerge and ‘take care of the situation’. Each identity has a different body, name, gender and particular characteristics. Even though it is usually believed that DID find its origin in one or many traumatic experiences during childhood (maltreatment or sexual abuse), there is no consensus about it. The cure is said to happen when traumatic memories are treated and personalities are integrated or fused together.

While the people I interview disagree in certain things, they seem to have a similar perspective towards how their body and their identity was perceived changing according to each situation; as well being a ‘man’ or being a ‘woman’ posses more an elastic composition that allow changes from place to place and according to whom they were relating to. It seemed to me at this point that the people I talk with could have multiple identities. However, there are three elements that I haven’t talked about yet, which are related to DID and seem to be decisive for differentiating the ‘normal’ from the ‘abnormal’: absorption, depersonalization and amnesia. ‘Absorption implies becoming so involved in what you are doing that you are unaware of what is going on around you. Depersonalization refers to experience events as if you are an observer, disconnected from your body or feelings.’ (Sinason 2002: 59) And there you are in the cinema absorbed by a movie, your popcorns still untouched, your soda or you beer is getting warm, and suddenly you just laugh or shout, and you just realized that your body was numbed and the whole world had disappeared for quite a while, and you don’t know for exactly how long. And what about a book? Or when doing something you really like?

‘Dissociative amnesia involves suddenly finding oneself in situations or faced with evidence that you have performed actions for which you have no memory.’ (Ibidem) In this sense dissociative amnesia are pools of forgotten events that interrupt the person’s perception on the continuity of its actions. According to DID, what can you remember plays a significant roll because of the correlation that events have within an actor. Patients diagnose with DID report having amnesia for identities associated to stealing or prostitution, which means that they were having different identities while stealing or prostituting, and those episodes cannot be remember.

Hence, if a person changes, that means if the identity and the body are perceived as changing in different circumstances, what stands between ‘normality’ and dissociative identity disorder is the ability to recall the actions in a continuous and sequential order by the perception of an identity/person/interiority which prevail among the others. It doesn’t matter if that prevailing one is changing as well, the only requirement is to have memory of the events, and to be able correlate those memories with a prevailing body?

The performative body.

We started this dialog on hospital ‘Z’ and atherosclerosis: where disease was built trough the enactment of different actors and their interactions. Then, following the medical perception of a fragmented body which is studied and eventually merged together in the enactment of a disease, I asked about the perception of that body from the patients point of view. If it was the case that the patient was experiencing a different body from place to place in the hospital, or it had the impression of a unique body that was being moved around and studied. Stubbornness brought me to ask people I know, and people I didn’t know, about the perception of their body and their identity; the never-ending conversations suggested that the perception of the body was changing: as having different clothes for different circumstances makes the perception of the body different. But as well identity was changing: different clothes for different circumstances made the actor perform in different ways. Costumes and sceneries have a direct influence in the performance of the actors. And that is what dissociative identity disorder is about; a body is dressed up, and at the same moment that the clothes come to be, an identity is created: a person is created in simultaneous interactions of many elements that are merge together in a body. A body is because an identity is, and vice versa. The body that comes to be and the identity that comes to be, both in simultaneity, mediate the performance of the actor. If that performance can be recalled within a continuity of performances because of its association with something that is stable, normality stands. Otherwise DID might surge. But that, which is forgotten in dissociative amnesia, has a significant correlation with the idea of traumaÛnormalization. As the cases of DID show, dissociative amnesia is hardly correlated to the ‘bad’, ‘forbidden’, or those things that are condemned, disapproved, castigated or censure in very specific contexts. Dissociative amnesia for episodes of prostituting might be as such because of the disapproval and censuring of such activities. The normative can find both: subtle and hard ways to be enacted. In 1600 Giordano Bruno was found guilty of heresy and burned by the state because heresy was considered illegal. Before 1973, the American Psychiatric Association to whom I have referred previously, considered homosexuality to be a mental disorder. Measures are created. Standardization is enacted through comparison: the bodies of atherosclerosis and DID.

Interiorities and internalizations.

According to Judith Butler, in Discipline and Punish Foucault criticizes the language of internalizations because of its disciplinary character in criminals. “In the context of prisoners, Foucault writes, the strategy has been not to enforce a repression of their desires, but to compel their bodies to signify the prohibited law as their very essence, style and necessity.” (Butler 2007: 183) Such strategy does not belong to a process of internalization, but to one of incorporation: “bodies are produced which signify that law on and through the body; there the law is manifest as the essence of their selves, the meaning of their soul, their conscience, the law of their desire.” But these interiorities, in the Foucaultian sense of a reality that is “produced permanently around, on, within, the body by the function of a power that is exercised on those that are punished as a reality that is produced permanently” (Butler 2007: 184), can be seen if we follow their conections; we can grasp what this Foucaultian power, in the case of criminals, is constituted of. Then we cans see that ‘power’ is more than a simple abstraction: it is made of laws, penal codes, courts, judges, police, jails, fences, uniforms, food, barbwire, schedules, prison cells, locks, tear gas, batons, vigilance towers, cameras etc. From my perspective, the law is not incorporated because of the exercise of power, but from the normalization of the body in these specific characteristics from which punishment is enacted. To be sure, the prisoner’s incorporation of a normative frame is a process where all those elements I had enounced (laws, uniforms, barbwire, prison cells etc.) and many more, merge together and are enacted into and through the body. The effectiveness of jail sentence seams to rely on the process of incorporation in the Foucaultian sense; however that process is dependent on how those disciplinary strategies are normalized in a given body by a temporal process. More time, influences, experiences, interiorities, are followed by more or less normalization. In this sense, normalization brings the bodies to signify the law as their very essence, style and necessity.

What Butler does is bringing the Foucaultian body and its incorporations into the gender perspective, she says: “that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institute the “integrity” of the subject.” (Butler 2007: 185)

But now, from a Latourian perspective, following the traces and connections left by the public and social discourses that mediate the public regulation of the body and institute the “integrity” of the subject, is not a black box to which we have no access. Yes, the public and social discourses regulate the body, but they don’t do it in a subliminal untraceable way!

Remember the example of the martyr? Yes, it is by the public and social discourses that the martyr is “integrated” into the subject. But that integration happens because of the enactment of very different and traceable things; remember the mother talking to the son about the martyr, the social worker that encourage mourning for the martyr, the public speeches about the martyr in which the family plays an active roll, the dinners, the practices, the museum etc.

Following the associations we could say two things: that gender is mediated by different human and non-human elements in order to be instituted as the “integrity” of the subject, and as well from the enactment of the subject in relation to those human and non-human elements. If you don’t believe me go to any shoe store, look around, you will find male shoes and female shoes. Stores arrange the clothes by types, but by genders! Hair cuts for dames en heren. Lenses for men and women. “If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seams that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.” (Butler: 186) In this manner, gender is not constitutive of an identity but inscribed in a body. And following the Foucaultian argument, gender becomes an interiority as an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse. However, as we have seen, we can see what these discourses are made of and which are the humans and non-humans that mediate in their enactment.

Plug-ins: a brief conclusion.

Identities are normalizations instituted and inscribed on the surface of the body. Identities are performative because they create during the interactions, movements and actions that a generic body establishes with human and non-human elements in very particular contexts. If identities are instituted and inscribed on the surface of the body, they become interiorities as the effect of a discourse that normalizes them as an intrinsic characteristic of the body. However, we know now that the discourses that normalize those interiorities are made of many different things that we can distinguish: we have to follow the traces and explain the connections.

If an operating system is already running, that particular OS will always mediate the plug-ins you can get. If an identity has being normalized and interiorized, it will discriminate from the extra interiorities you can get. To be sure, the amount of extra interiorities or plug-ins that you could get will always be mediated by that identity that has being already normalized. So the Latourian saying about “the more intense the shower of offers of subjectivities, the more interiority you get” (Latour 2007: 208) will depend on the mediation made by an ongoing identity.

In DID, different identities have being normalized in different bodies. An identity is inscribed on the surface of a body, but another identity is inscribed on the surface of another body; as many identities are inscribed as many bodies there are. However, these identities are normalizations inscribed on the surface of different bodies. The cure happens when all identities are inscribed on the surface of the same body, when a prevailing one mediates the perception of all the other identities. It is the perception of a body that enables this movement.

Seems to me that if you want to have new interiorities you will need to try harder. It is not a matter of going out and take a good shower of interiorities. As long as the process of discrimination is active, experiencing something new is rather hard. You might be hearing the music, but not experiencing it; you might be seeing the sunset but not experiencing it. May be we forgot that we are only a body that feels. However this is just what ‘I’ think.

Bibliography.

Butler, J. (2007). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.

Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mitchell, J. (2000). Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.

Sinason. V. (ed.) (2002). Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder. New York: Brunner-Routledge.

[1] Tarde, G. (1895/1999). Monadologie et sociologie. Paris: Les empecheurs de penser rond, in Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. [2] For a further discussion on these issues see Mitchell, J. (2000). Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books. [3] For a complete overview of the case study see: Sinason. V. (Ed.) (2002). Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder. New York: Brunner-Routledge.