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Transitional Selves

This book engages with the ethics and practices of identity formation in a
world experiencing identity stress. It engages with crucial questions such
as: what models are shaping our view of ourselves and the society in which
we live? What images ground our perception of what is true and real? How
have the images been historically produced? What are the effects of such
models on definitions of self? Should we break free from these images if we
get to know what they are? Is it possible to change our models in order to
create freer identities?
Through a range of distinctive lenses, the chapters in the volume deal with
the ideas of the ‘liminal self’, the ‘digital self’ and ‘identities in flux’ and point
to ‘anthropologies of self/selves’ that situate current identity processes within
their cultures and explore strategies and dilemmas from this perspective.
This key volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of literary
stories, critical theory, social theory, social anthropology, philosophy, and
political philosophy.

Marcus Bussey is Senior Lecturer in History and Futures in the School of Law
and Society at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. As a cultural
theorist, historian, and futurist, he works on cultural processes that energize
social transformation. He uses futures thinking and embodied workshops to
challenge the dominant beliefs and assumptions that constrain human responses
to rapid cultural, social, environmental, and technological change.

Meera Chakravorty is Research Faculty in the Department of Cultural

Studies at Jain University, Bangalore, India. She has been a member of
Karnataka State Women’s Commission, Bangalore. Her engagement has
been with Philosophy, Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies Consciousness
Studies, and Translation projects.

Camila Mozzini-Alister is a Writer, Academic Researcher, Lecturer,

and Social Media Educator based on the Sunshine Coast, Australia.
Her background is a double PhD in Communication (UERJ-Brazil) and
Arts: Production and Investigation (UPV-Spain), with a Research Master’s
in Social & Institutional Psychology (UFRGS-Brazil) and a Bachelor
(Honours) in Social Communication – Journalism (UFRGS-Brazil).
Transitional Selves
Possibilities for Identity in a Plurified
World

Edited by Marcus Bussey, Meera

Chakravorty, and Camila Mozzini-Alister
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Marcus Bussey, Meera Chakravorty, and
Camila Mozzini-Alister; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Marcus Bussey, Meera Chakravorty, and Camila Mozzini-Alister
to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-12543-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-49963-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-39624-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003396246
Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents

List of Contributors viii

Foreword: Becoming Blind So We Can See xiv

SOHAIL INAYATULLAH

1 Introduction: Identity and Becoming in a Plurified World 1

MARCUS BUSSEY, MEERA CHAKRAVORTY AND CAMILA MOZZINI-ALISTER

PART 1
Liminal Identities 13

2 ‘Who Am I?’: Vertigo and the Identity Threshold 15

MARCUS BUSSEY

3 The Creative Self: Artistic Performance and the Making and

Finding of Identity 33
JOHN CLAMMER

4 Ecological Identity through Dialogue 49

CHARLES SCOTT

5 On the Crossroads: Hard and Soft Paths at the Centre of

International Education 65
JOSÉ VAN DEN AKKER

6 Transilient Identities: Creating Queer Fictive Narratives for

Transmodern Cultural Realities 83
GIL DOUGLAS
vi Contents
PART 2
Digital Identities 97

7 Oceanic Medium: Technology, Identity and Maritime

Imagination in Vilém Flusser 99
ERICK FELINTO

8 Virtual Belonging in a Plurified World: Online Culture and

How the Formation of the Digital ‘I’ Impacts an Individual’s
Sense of Belonging 111
GINNA BROCK

9 The Soul of the Profile: The Subtle Link between the Practices
of Mediation and Meditation 122
CAMILA MOZZINI-ALISTER

10 Identity and Political Polarization in Post-Industrial Capitalism 134

PETTER TÖRNBERG

PART 3
Perspectives on Identity 155

11 A Plunge into the Inner Self: Reflections about Spiritual

Identity in Neohumanist Philosophy 157
RACHEL ANDRIOLLO TROVARELLI

12 Transitional Self: The Other Being 173

MEERA CHAKRAVORTY

13 Identity as a Construct: Possibilities of Self-Transcendence 187

SAJI VARGHESE

14 Identity and Ahimsa 201

ANANTA KUMAR GIRI

PART 4
Anthropologies of Identity 211

15 Messengers and Media Messages: Learning, Knowledge and

Identity of Muslim Women in India 213
ZAZIE BOWEN
 Contents vii
16 Feeling Sexy and Cool in the Diaspora: The Construction of
Hybrid Identities for Young Migrants through Dressing and
Dancing 231
CATHERINE RITA VOLPE

17 High Tide or Low Tide: The Navigation of Modernity,

Tradition and Kava 250
MADIGAN PAINE

18 The Ayahuasca Voices: An earthly consciousness 265

GUILLERMO GIUCCI AND SEBASTIÁN TORTEROLA

19 Identity, Culture, and Migration: A Personal Narrative of an

Emergent Self 282
DEXTER DA SILVA

20 It is Hard Being Whole in a World That Sees You in Parts 292

CHERIE MINNIECON

Afterword 301
MARCUS BUSSEY

Index 303
Contributors

José van den Akker (PhD, MEdSt, AdvDipTAT) has worked as a full-
time researcher at several Australian universities. She completed her
PhD (Exploring and Working with the Dynamics in Cross Cultural
Education) in 2009. Her research interests have since somewhat shifted
to the areas of migration, international education, and migrants’ inte-
gration and inclusion. As a qualified and ANZACATA, (Australia, New
Zealand, Asia, Creative Arts Therapists Association), registered transper-
sonal art therapist, José also offers art therapy sessions and workshops,
and she researches the impact thereof on participants’ social wellbeing
and resilience.
Zazie Bowen is an anthropologist, South Asian scholar and sessional aca-
demic in the Tjabal Centre, the Australian National University. Zazie’s
research intersects education ethnography, children and young people
studies, visual anthropology, anthropology of play, gender studies, medi-
cal anthropology approaches to mental health and wellbeing, critical
First Nations studies, and futures studies. Her current research focus is
Australian Indigenous students’ experiences of school-based wellbeing
programs. She is also involved in initiatives to enhance inter-generational
collaborations.
Ginna Brock is Lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at the
University of the Sunshine Coast. Her research focuses on philosophical
concepts of belonging, along with representations of connectivity within
artistic expressions. Ginna has published in script-writing, poetry, and
song writing and is on the editorial collective for Social Alternatives.
In 2017, Ginna became a fellow with the Higher Education Academy.
Ginna Brock is a specialist in Communication Studies, Creative Writing
Techniques, and Literary Studies. She is knowledgeable in script writing
and fiction, along with early British Literature and the tragic genre.
Marcus Bussey is Senior Lecturer in History and Futures in the School of
Law and Society at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. As a
cultural theorist, historian and futurist, he works on cultural processes
 Contributors  ix
that energize social transformation. He uses futures thinking and embod-
ied workshops to challenge the dominant beliefs and assumptions that
constrain human responses to rapid cultural, social, environmental, and
technological change. He is currently focused on the role of futures edu-
cation and the anticipatory imagination in preparing students for com-
plex futures that they will live and work in. Marcus has co-authored
with Professor Richard Slaughter Futures Thinking for Social Foresight
(2005). He has also co-edited two books with Sohail Inayatullah and
Ivana Milojević – Neohumanist Educational Futures (2006) and
Alternative Educational Futures (2008). In addition, he has edited Tantric
Women Tell Their Stories (2007) and co-edited Dynamics of Dissent:
Theorising Movements for Inclusive Futures (2019, Routledge) with
Meera Chakravorty, John Clammer, and Tanmayee Banerjee. Marcus
has held fellowships at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore, and
Tamkang University, Taiwan. He is currently Program Leader in Futures
Studies at his university. Marcus has edited with Camilla Mozzini-Alister
Phenomenologies of Grace: the body, embodiment, and transformative
futures (2020 Palgrave). His book of poetry (as social theory) The Next
Big Thing! was released in 2019.
Meera Chakravorty, PhD, is Research Faculty in the Department of Cultural
Studies at Jain University, Bangalore. She has been a member of the
Karnataka State Women’s Commission, Bangalore. Her engagement has
been with Philosophy, Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies Consciousness
Studies, and Translation projects. She has translated some award-win-
ning literary works of renowned authors published by Sahitya Akademi
(The Academy of Letters, India). She was awarded for her writing on
‘Time’ by University of Interdisciplinary Studies, Paris, sponsored by the
John Templeton Foundation. She has also been awarded for her literary
work by Tagore Cultural Centre, Bangalore.
John Clammer is Professor in the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and
Humanities, and Professor of Sociology in the Jindal Global Law
School at O.P. Jindal Global University, Delhi, India. After complet-
ing his Doctorate at Oxford University, he taught at the Department of
Sociology and Social Anthropology and the Centre for Southeast Asian
Studies at the University of Hull (UK), before moving to the University
of Singapore (later the National University), and later to the chair of
Comparative Sociology and Asian Studies at Sophia University in
Tokyo. In 2006 he moved to United Nations University, also in Tokyo,
as Advisor to the Rector and Professor of Development Sociology. In
August 2016 he retired from the UNU (United Nations University) to
take up his current position at O.P. Jindal Global University. He has been
Visiting Fellow or Professor at a number of universities around the world,
including the University of the South Pacific (Suva, Fiji), the University
of Tokyo, the University of Kent at Canterbury, Murdoch University,
x Contributors
the Australian National University, the University of Essex, Oxford
University, Handong University (South Korea), the University of Buenos
Aires, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Pondicherry Central University, and
Kanda University of Foreign Studies. He has published widely on a range
of subjects, including most recent issues of culture and development, art
and society and the dialogue between Western social theory and Asian
societies.
Dexter Da Silva is currently Professor of Educational Psychology at Keisen
University in Tokyo. He has taught at junior high schools, language
schools, and universities in Sydney, Australia, and for more than three
decades has been living, and teaching at the tertiary level, in Japan. He
was educated at the University of Sydney (BA, Dip. Ed., MA), and the
University of Western Sydney (PhD). He has presented and co-presented
at conferences in Asia, Australia, Europe, and the USA, co-edited two
books on Motivation in Foreign Language Learning, and written or co-
written articles and book chapters on education-related topics, such as
trust, student motivation, autonomy, and content-based language teach-
ing. He is a past editor of OnCUE Journal, past president of Asian
Psychological Association, regular reviewer for conferences, proceed-
ings, journal articles, and book chapters, and regularly co-chairs and
participates in the Organising Committee of conferences on Motivation,
Language Learning and Teaching, and Psychology and the Behavioral
Sciences.
Gil Douglas has worked in the creative industries as a performer, crea-
tive director, and producer for many years and has a degree in Creative
Writing from the University of the Sunshine Coast, graduating with
an academic medal and the Chancellor’s medal. He has a Master’s in
Writing, Editing, and Publishing from the University of Queensland and
is currently completing a PhD exploring the myths that underpin human
realities. He teaches History, Sociology, Communication, Creative
Writing, and Poetry, and in his spare time, writes and performs at spoken
word gatherings on the Queensland Sunshine Coast.
Erick Felinto has been Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the
State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) since 1999. He has published
extensively in Portuguese, English, French, and German in fields such
as film studies, comparative literature, and media theory. He held vis-
iting professorships in Germany (Universität der Künste) and the USA
(NYU: New York University) and is currently a researcher for CNPq (the
Brazilian National Council for Research and Development). His most
recent research deals with the conservative worldview and current politi-
cal situation in Latin America.
Ananta Kumar Giri is Professor at the Madras Institute of Development
Studies, Chennai, India. He has taught and done research in many
 Contributors  xi
universities in India and abroad, including Aalborg University (Denmark),
Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris (France), the University of
Kentucky (USA), University of Freiburg and Humboldt University
(Germany), Jagiellonian University (Poland), and Jawaharlal Nehru
University (New Delhi). He has an abiding interest in social movements
and cultural change, criticism, creativity and contemporary dialectics of
transformation, theories of self, culture, and society, and creative streams
in education, philosophy, and literature. Dr. Giri has written and edited
around two dozen books in Odia and English.

Guillermo Giucci (PhD, Stanford University, 1987) is Full Professor at the

State University of Rio de Janeiro and author of Viajantes do maravilhoso:
o Novo Mundo (1992; La conquista de lo maravilloso, 1992); Sem fé, lei
ou rei: Brasil 1500-1532 (1993); A vida cultural do automóvel (2004; La
vida cultural del automóvil, 2007; The Cultural Life of the Automobile,
2012); Gilberto Freyre. Uma biografia cultural (with Enrique Rodríguez
Larreta, 2007); Tierra del Fuego. La creación del fin del mundo (2014);
and El viaje colectivo (with Tomás Errázuriz, 2018). He organised, with
Enrique Rodríguez Larreta and Edson Nery da Fonseca, the critical edi-
tion of Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande & senzala (Paris: Archives, 2002).
He was Visiting Professor at the universities Albert-Ludwigs, Poitiers,
Texas, Los Angeles, Stanford. He was also awarded with the Guggenheim
and Tinker fellowships.

Sohail Inayatullah, a political scientist, is the UNESCO Chair in Futures

Studies at the Sejahtera Centre for Sustainability and Humanity, Malaysia;
Professor of Futures Studies at Tamkang University, Taipei; and,
Associate at Melbourne Business School, the University of Melbourne.
From 2011 to 2014, he was Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Policing,
Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, Macquarie University, Sydney. In
1999, he was the UNESCO Chair in European Studies at the University
of Trier, Germany. He received his doctorate from the University
of Hawaii in 1990. Inayatullah has lived in Islamabad, Pakistan;
Bloomington, Indiana; Flushing, New York; Geneva, Switzerland; Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Brisbane and Mooloolaba,
Australia. His recent books include Asia 2038, The End of the Cow and
other Emerging issues, and CLA 3.0: Thirty Years of Transformative
Research.

Cherie Minniecon is based on Kabi Kabi Country. She runs her own
futures and strategic foresight consultancy. Previously, Cherie taught
at Melbourne University in a program designed in partnership with the
Willin Centre on Indigenous Arts and Changing the Nation. With exten-
sive experience in policy and program development in government and
non-government organizations, Cherie has spent over 20 years working
locally and internationally co-designing context-specific social change
xii Contributors
programs. Cherie is a qualified social worker and completed futures stud-
ies at the University of the Sunshine Coast.
Camila Mozzini-Alister is a Writer, Academic Researcher, Lecturer and
Social Media Educator based on the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Her back-
ground is a double PhD in Communication (UERJ-Brazil) and Arts:
Production and Investigation (UPV-Spain), with a Research Master’s
in Social & Institutional Psychology (UFRGS-Brazil) and a Bachelor
(Honours) in Social Communication – Journalism (UFRGS-Brazil). Her
research affinities are located in the interfaces between body, technol-
ogy, social media, spirituality, migration, and desire for omnipresence. In
2021, she published her PhD research about desire for omnipresence in
the book "Does Social Media Have Limits? Bodies of Light & the Desire
for Omnipresence", by Palgrave Macmillan, where she thoroughly stud-
ied the hidden link between mediation and meditation, mind and screen,
as the germ for understanding the current forms of technical expansion
of our body substrate. Camila takes writing as a field of poetic experi-
mentation and the body as our first and ultimate creative substratum.
Madigan Paine is Teacher of Humanities. She is passionate about the field
of post-colonial studies, particularly within the Pacific region and the
embedding of post-colonial perspectives within the humanities curricu-
lum. While a student, she received a New Colombo Plan grant to work
in Fiji where she lived in the village of Bua and researched first-hand the
Kava traditions of her local community.
Charles Scott is Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser
University and Associate Professor in the Albright School of Education
at City University in Canada. His work currently focuses on the place
of contemplative inquiry in education, including its role in establishing
closer connections between us and the more-than-human world.
Petter Törnberg is postdoctoral VENI researcher in digital geography at the
University of Amsterdam, and a postdoctoral researcher at University of
Neuchatel. Törnberg studies societal implications of digitalization, data-
fication and platformization, with a focus on conflict, power, and iden-
tity through the lens of digital data.
Sebastian Torterola is a translator, journalist, and researcher. He has a
Master’s degree in Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature
from the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Brazil. He
also holds degrees in Communication Sciences and Translation Studies
at the Universidad de la República (UDELAR), Uruguay. His research
areas combine literature, drugs, and spirituality. He is the author and
co-author of articles about hashish, ayahuasca, entheogens, and neo-sha-
manism in Latin America, which he has published in academic magazines
and books as well as in journalistic printed and online publications.
 Contributors  xiii
Rachel Andriollo Trovarelli is an Environmental Manager (Luiz de Queiroz
College of Agriculture, University of São Paulo – ESALQ/USP – Brazil),
Master and PhD in Sciences, both from a Post-Graduate Program in
Applied Ecology (USP). Her research-intervention interests navigate
through environmental sciences, with a focus on environmental educa-
tion and possibilities of transition to future co-creation. She has been
working in recent years with professional training, socio-environmental
project management, and mental and body health.
Saji Varghese is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Lady
Keane College, Shillong. He has done his PhD from North Eastern Hill
University, Shillong, on the Political Philosophy of Antonio Gramsci. His
area of interest lies in Environmental Ethics, Cultures in transition, and
contemporary social and cultural issues. He has a number of publications
in National and International journals and edited books to his credit,
including Beyond Humanism (2014), Nature, Culture and Philosophy
(2014), and Globalization and Cultural Pluralism (2016).
Catherine Rita Volpe is Lecturer at the University of New England in Australia
in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, and Education. She
completed her PhD at the University of the Sunshine Coast in young
people’s geographies with a focus on identity performativities of young
migrants across diasporic private, public, and online spaces. She con-
tinues her research with young people in the areas of migration, digital
geographies, education, and identity.
Foreword
Becoming Blind So We Can See
Sohail Inayatullah

Chal Way Bullehya Chal O’thay Chaliyay

Jithay Saaray Annay
Na Koi Saadee Zaat PichHanay
Tay Na Koi Saanu Mannay
***
O’ Bulleh Shah let’s go there
Where everyone is blind
Where no one recognizes our caste (or race, or family name)
And where no one believes in us1

Blindness in this mystical poem becomes an asset as it challenges our ethnic,

religious, and family identity. And yet most of us wish to see and hear. How
can we then go blind and still see?
In meditation, we go to depth. We go to a space where we are beyond
categories. And yet after meditation, we return to this world. Shrii Sarkar
writes:

That which comes within the orbit of mind is but a relative truth,
not an eternal truth and so it will come and go. Scriptures (texts) and
mythologies are but stacks of bricks, they are only arranged in layers,
carrying no significance or intrinsic value. So how can they describe
the Transcendental Entity which is beyond the scope of the mental fac-
ulty. How then can this intuitional perspective be interpreted, which is
beyond the compass of body, words and mind? Here both the teacher
and disciple are helpless, because the subject, which is beyond the
domain of any academic discourse and discussion, is simply inexplicable
and inexpressible. Whatever said and discussed comes within the ambit
of the mind and so it is a relative truth – true today and false tomorrow.
That is why, the teacher becomes mute when he is asked to explain
transcendental knowledge (the Buddha remained silent when asked if
the Transcendental entity existed and equally silent when asked if it
did not exist) and consequently the disciple, too, becomes deaf. So …
in order to explain this profound mystery, there is no other alternative
 Foreword xv
than to emulate the symbolic exchange of views between a deaf and a
dumb person.2

However, it is after meditation, after we can see, that the issues begin.
For we need to make sense of the world, to understand it and our place
in it. This becomes an identity issue. There are a number of conceptual
choices. First, the tradition, we are given an identity, as a father, as a son.
We keep the trade and religion of the father, at least the son does. The
daughter keeps her job as a mother and housewife but in a different fam-
ily. The second is the spiritual. In this, through practice, our mind frees
itself from attachment, and we are as Shah and Sarkar write: blind and
deaf/mute. The third are the works of Hal and Sidra Stone. For them, sit-
ting in the space between tradition and the spiritual is the world of many
selves. We are one at the spiritual level, but in this world, we are many.
Selves develop to protect our inner child, ensuring her and his survival. We
have pusher selves that seek to achieve, pleaser selves that seek to make
all happy, perfectionist selves that seek correctness in every moment, and
many many more. Thus, the spiritual person can experience bliss in one
moment, and in another evoke the self of patriarchy, the landlord who
owns it all. The bliss disappears and is power over others that remains.
For the Stones’s, however, the task is not to eliminate these selves, but to
use them as appropriate. The pusher self achieves but at the cost of rest
and equity – he must be number one but loses community. The pleaser
self-creates community but loses autonomy, often becoming a pushover,
a doormat. Stones suggest we meditate and watch our different selves and
use them appropriately.
It is these archetypes not understood that become overbearing – the
selves control us, instead of our wise self, our watcher self, our aware self,
controlling them. For Sarkar, the core selves are four. The worker – who
works hard and lives in the present. The warrior – who conquers the mate-
rial world and tells stories of past adventures. The intellectual – who under-
stands how we understand and who uses knowledge to create bliss and
thrive (or who uses knowledge to imprison others so that we have privilege).
And lastly, the accumulator – who uses wealth to control all – the other
selves and nature – and to create goods and services.
While these selves are historical, they can be changed. Sarkar suggested
that a new identity be forged through their integration. S/he works hard,
protects, innovates, and creates wealth – this is the sadvipra.
Sarkar’s point is that the space between the spirit and tradition needs
to be challenged by creating new identities. Globalisation, digitalisation,
genomics, and other technologies that change who we are can offer us new
and endless choices. But in a world of endless choices, what are we to do?
For Sarkar, we need to create the new self of the sadvipra, even as we search
for the space of the no-self, of identity that is not linked to the material
world.
xvi Foreword
Thus, it is not the blindness of our mystic Bullah Shah that is the future,
but the seeing anew, becoming blind so we can recreate our identities and
become the exceptions. Evolution thus stated is not about being the norm,
about following tradition, but about being the exception. The exception
becomes the new identity – that leads the way in complex futures.
However, as we move toward this new sadvipra exceptional identity, we
would be stupid to think that tradition would not fight back. The old self
of the patriarchy wishes not for mutation, but for the rules to be reinforced.
He argues that they are natural – the text of every religion has told us so.
We must honour the past!
Citizens seeing the world in disarray – changes in global hegemons,
changes in energy, technological breakthroughs, movements for gender
equity, LGBTQI rights, the rights of nature and animals – become future
shocked. In steps tradition. I know the way, follow me.
Thus, Shah does not recommend sight. Become blind, so you cannot
follow those who think they know. The Stones suggest understanding our
many selves. Sarkar goes further and suggests that we create a new identity,
for a new phase for humanity. If we don’t, then ontological blindness will
result. We will not be able to see ourselves or the future.
Which path will we create? Which self will create it?
The following pages help answer these questions.

Notes
1 https://www​.facebook​.com​/notes​/sufism​/bulleh​-shah​-chal​-way​-bullehya​-chal​
-othay​-chaliyay​-lets-g (Accessed 11/2/2020).
2 P. R. Sarkar, Subhasita Samgraha. Anandanagar, Ananda Marga Publications,
1975, 114–115.
1 Introduction
Identity and Becoming in a
Plurified World
Marcus Bussey, Meera Chakravorty and
Camila Mozzini-Alister

Our world is fragmenting under the pressure of multiple trends. It seems

humanity has outgrown its spatio-temporal referents and the narratives
that sustained them. These simple narratives are no longer up to the task
of sustaining stable selves. Environmental stress, globalisation, mass dis-
placements of people, violence, cyberspace and now COVID-19 all stretch
and twist, fold and invert the comfortable contours of self that have held
identity on its course for generations. The result is identity stress. Self is no
longer a noun, anchored in time and place and sustained through stable and
repetitive incantations. Even the most remote individual ‘self’ is required to
define him/her/us/themselves/itself iteratively in relationship with the pow-
erful centres of identity creation. As this statement illustrates, even personal
pronouns are not what they used to be. They are political and existential
markers in a world that is in flux. Identity is either attached to a funda-
mentalist essentialised constellation of gender, ethnic, religious, nationalist,
ideological groups or up for grabs as a mishmash of competing partial and
unstable elements, all telling partial open-ended stories.

On the Edge
Today, there is a collective feeling of being on the ‘edge’, that something
‘big’ is about to erupt. The human world has mixed feelings about this:
there is the fear of change, yet there is the hope of the new that might
emerge. The only certainty is uncertainty. And it is through this uncertain
territory that each one of us is invited to invent strategies to keep our hope
alive. Questions arise: how can we experience ourselves as coherent beings
in a context that dilutes every single drop of stability? How to build freedom
in a more and more automated world of choices? What values can we draw
upon to guide us safely through this time of uncertainty? What are our per-
sonal and collective preferred futures? And what do we fear?
These questions directly deal with our ethics, that is, how to become
free subjects in the face of such sophisticated mechanisms of control that
merge the technics of entertainment with discourses of spirituality as tools
to manipulate our choices and the assumptions and values that drive them

DOI: 10.4324/9781003396246-1
2 Marcus Bussey et al.
(Mozzini-Alister, 2021). Our margin to make ethical choices has been
reduced – and the responsibility that comes with our choices is increas-
ingly demanding attention. Is it possible, the editors of this volume ask, to
suggest a single ‘strategic’ identity for humanity? Or, is identity a mosaic
of infinite emergent possibilities? The singular struggles here, whereas the
plural, the process of plurification, seems to act as a solvent on all that was
once certain.
Our selection of chapters for this book is an attempt to stimulate think-
ing around this dissolution of certainty. In a plurified world, where the
multiple is the common experience of the majority of humanity, there are
bound to be plural identities; yet is there something driving our quest for
identity? The local is experienced as time, place and person, yet person-
hood itself suggests at least something unifying, expansive and open-ended.
Something paradoxically both ‘open’ and ‘integrating’. Etymologically, the
word ‘identity’ comes from the Latin identitas, which means ‘sameness,
oneness, state of being the same’. From this perspective, we can think of a
common ground where we are all equal to one another, even in our differ-
ences. Maybe what makes us the same is precisely this: being different. ‘I’m
introverted, extroverted, emotional, logical, organized, chaotic’ or all at
once. Therefore, we can also think of identity as something private, unique
to each individual, something that has an image – or accepted fiction – of
what sums up his/her/them traits and character over the course of a life. The
important point is that to be identical, that is, to remain the same, there
must be an original frame, a matrix or a model from which we derive our
similarities. Thus, to question identity becomes, ultimately, the act of inves-
tigating what models are shaping our view of ourselves and the society in
which we live. What images ground our perception of what is true and real?
How have the images been historically produced? What are the effects of
such models on definitions of self? Should we break free from these images
if we get to know what they are? Is it possible to change our models in order
to create freer identities?
There is no attempt to provide accurate and correct answers to such ques-
tions, and our goal with this collection of essays is to share engagements,
and offer assemblages, with such questions through a range of distinctive
lenses. Questions are more interesting than answers. We have grouped our
reflections into four parts that have distinct orientations. Part 1 deals with
the ‘liminal self’ as a process-oriented property of the contemporary experi-
ence; Part 2 targets the ‘digital self’ in recognition that mediated identity is a
unique feature of modern consciousness and a powerful force in mediating
experience in, and of, a ‘plurified’ world; Part 3 engages with ‘identities in
flux’ from a philosophical and sociological perspective, whilst Part 4 takes a
more intimate look into identity struggles and formation, offering ‘anthro-
pologies of self/selves’ that situate current identity processes within their
cultures and explores personal and intimate strategies and dilemmas from
this perspective.
 Introduction 3
In Part 1, Bussey (Chapter 2) opens by asking the question ‘Who am I?’.
He explores this question through the lens of culture, arguing that today
we consume identity as a way of masking the disquiet within: ‘I click/touch
the screen therefore I am’ becomes a recursive process for which there is no
response other than to continue with the task of self-iteration. Compulsive
and lost. Ultimately, there is a trust dimension in all this, and thus he con-
cludes: ‘Who am I? My “hideouts” are discovered and yet nothing certain is
revealed. All we have is a perhaps-map and a promise’. In Chapter 3, John
Clammer argues that we perform the self and that it is an ongoing creative
process. For him, to approach such a creative self calls forth a theory that
incorporates ‘a study of the contingencies of human life, of the unexpected,
and of the fluid conception of identity that must emerge, not as a failure to
achieve identity-stability, but as the normal form of Being-in-the-world’.
Charles Scott in Chapter 4 turns to inter-subjectivity as the basis for an eco-
logical identity. He argues that educators can foster the expanded awareness
required to ground ‘empathically inclusive’ ecological self-consciousness in
students through curated experiences such as ‘artistic and contemplative
practices, and the pedagogical practice of dialogue itself’.
In Chapter 5, van den Akker explores the transitional experience of
international students making it clear that the difficulties faced once such
students find themselves cast into a monocultural milieu such as Australia
are extreme. She focuses on identity struggles during the event space of the
Anthropocene. Her account concludes that the ‘identity machine’ keeps roll-
ing on and students find themselves metaphorically on a train that has gone
off the tracks. The rules are up for grabs so that students ‘can only rely
on their own agency, their only [train] station lies inside themselves and
their sense of connectedness with different landscapes and various emplaced
communities’. Gil Douglas, in Chapter 6, picks up on this recognition of
agency as he argues, in line with Clammer, that identity is performative. It
is something we do that is site specific, situated in a time-space that is fluid,
open and intensified in queer constructions of self as narrative ‘fictions’ that
defy binary constructs of a gendered self. Thus, he notes that ‘the performa-
tive state of trans resists the binary restrictions of compulsory gender cat-
egories and heterosexuality by undoing certainties in sites of power that are
contestable and, hence, differentially produced in timespace configurations’.
Part 2 turns to the digital self/selves that many of us today perform.
Chapter 7 is a meditation from Erick Felinto on the work by Vilém Flusser
entitled, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. This extraordinary text offers a rich
set of metaphors for thinking through the digital era we inhabit and the
seductions and entrapments it offers. Felinto picks up on van den Akker’s
exploration of the crossroad and the issue of translation that involves ‘the
exchange between different universes of reference’. For Felinto, peering into
Flusser’s liquid imaginary, it is in the ocean of meaning/being that the digi-
tal world represents, that ‘humanity will abandon all fixed ground in order
to venture into non-mapped territories, in a universe of radical novelty’. In
4 Marcus Bussey et al.
Ginna Brock’s Chapter 8, she looks at belonging as an ontological drive in
humanity. From her reading of Greek tragedy, the ‘ultimate tragedy’ is to
be ‘unhoused’, adrift in the sea that fascinates Felinto. Like Felinto, Brock
sees in social media a dissolution of traditional identity coordinates. Digital
media amplifies the narrative and fictive in formations of the Self. Thus, she
sees it as a cause for alarm, given that human ‘existence, the health of the
human psyche and the ability to function in a plurified world, depends on
belonging’. As a result, she calls for more social media users to ‘recognise
the artificial tendencies of the online sphere and refuse to allow impersonal
connectivity to impact their solidified sense of belonging’. In Chapter 9,
Mozzini-Alister explores the intriguing link between mediation and medita-
tion. Like Felinto she draws on Vilém Flusser’s work on anthropotechnics
to argue that the human devotion to mediated identities is the result of the
urge for limitlessness. To make her case, she contrasts the anthropotechnics
inherent to smart devices with the anthropotechnics of yogic practices. The
goal of both, she argues, is to expand the self beyond our physical presence
towards ‘omnipresence’. Petter Törnberg, in Chapter 10, offers a strikingly
contrasting analysis of the effects of social media on identity formation to
that of both Felinto and Mozzni-Alister. His focus is on the differentiation
based on a socio-economic shift towards ‘an accumulation regime that con-
sumes and produces difference’. This reading of the identity context leads
him to argue for ‘partisan identities’ that rationalise via emotional identifi-
cation, as opposed to any form of shared objective deduction. Ultimately for
Törnberg, it is not any specific mediating technology that drives identity for-
mation and performance but the socio-economics, which in our post-Fordist
era favours an ‘economy of scope’ that harvests the energy of ‘divergent
and to some degree uncontrollable cultural processes, even when these are
antagonistic to its own smooth functioning’.
Part 3 takes a different turn in which the discourse of identity itself
is thought of as being in flux. Rachel Trovarelli, in Chapter 11, invites
us to consider the transitional self from the perspective of Neohumanism,
a socio-spiritual philosophy proposed by Indian guru and philosopher
Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar. This philosophical approach is rooted in the spir-
itual worldview of Tantra which actively encourages us to explore the
transitional self through the ‘practice of meditation [which] can expand
individual identity towards a planetary identity … or beyond this, [to]
a universal identity’. In Chapter 12, Meera Chakravorty explores issues
pertaining to trans-sexual identity in which the struggle hinges on ‘a new
discourse [that] appears to be a poetics of resistance [that] adds to this iden-
tity’. For Chakravorty, the tension between the hegemonic complacency of
dominant gendered selves contrasts markedly with identity work involving
‘a kind of liberatory, positionality’ in which new elements of being offer
critical insights into the constraints and power imbalances experienced by
identities on the ‘margin’, but with real clarity in the realm of gender and
identity. Saji Varghese, in Chapter 13, approaches identity through the lens
 Introduction 5
of modernity, suggesting that selfhood is in flux because of the pervasive
nihilism of our time that we experience as a ‘loss of horizon’. Thus, the
modern self is ‘disengaged’, ‘flattened’ and ‘disenchanted’. In the light of
this flattened reality, Varghese turns to the spiritual and philosophical tra-
ditions of India and suggests a ‘self-transcendence’ in which the hegemonic
materialism of modernity is tempered and offers a ‘transcultural between-
world reality’ in which the individual and their multiple sites of being find
the freedom to develop a ‘self-luminous consciousness full of Love, Power,
Joy and Knowledge’. Following this work by Varghese, Ananta Kumar
Giri, in Chapter 14, offers a broad vision for the transitional identity as
‘a multi-dimensional journey in self, society, culture, world and cosmos’.
Such identity work calls Giri to reflect on the positionality of the sub-
ject under constant construction as a work between various topoi. Thus,
he focuses on the transpositionality of identity within an open space he
calls transpositional-subject-objectivity. This space challenges us to trans-
form ‘subjectivity and objectivity as we know it, including [their] trans-
formation … from nouns to verbs – meditative verbs of pluralisation’ that
greatly expand the possibilities before humanity in a time of polarisation
and struggle.
Part 4 of this text turns to the consideration of transitional selves in the
lived experiences of the subject. We have six chapters in this section which
look at cultural contexts in which the self/selves become engaged in the
work of ‘becoming’. Zazie Bowen, in Chapter 15, brings an ethnographer’s
eye to the formal and non-formal learning of Muslim Indian women as she
attempts to address the question: ‘how do Indian Muslim women approach
knowledge and learning; and how do their diverse pursuits of learning influ-
ence their notions of identity?’ In Chapter 16, Catherine Rita Volpe explores
the hybrid identities of young Indian women in Brisbane, Australia. She
argues, ‘Young migrants are challenging polarised identities’ by adopting
hybrid strategies that disrupt the categories imposed on them via host com-
munities. Similarly, Madigan Paine in Chapter 17 identifies hybrid identity
strategies at work in the Fijian kava ceremony. In this context the process of
indigenisation of Christianity engages with modernity, tradition and culture
to work transgressively across once clear boundaries to open up a tradition
once the province of Fijian chiefs, to a broadly democratised experience of
sociality. In Chapter 18, Guillermo Giucci and Sebastián Torterola explore
the ceremonies of ‘Umbanda, the Afro-Brazilian religion, … with ayahuasca,
the main Amazonian psychoactive plant’. Their goal is to introduce the con-
cept of geophonics: ‘the study of the voices of the earth, which are accessible
through the ingestion of certain plants that excite our neurotransmitters’.
They enter the world of Umbanda as participant researchers to understand,
and report back on, the power of this shamanic tradition in furthering their
‘psycho-spiritual journey [in which tradition] meets academic research to
converge in the formulation of geophonics as an inclusive concept where
multiple resonances coexist’.
6 Marcus Bussey et al.
In the final two chapters, Chapters 19 and 20, the voice of the authors
shifts to the personal. Both have an embodied sense of the plural at work in
their identities, both wrestle with the existential dilemmas that arise for them
as a result. Dexter da Silva speaks to his experience of being of and other
in Trinidad, Australia and Japan whilst Cherie Minniecon takes us into her
world as an Aboriginal Australian of mixed descent. For da Silva, his life
journey has been one of accepting his multiplicity, whilst for Minniecon she
must engage in a balancing act. But living with the politics of Aboriginality
in Australia is to live with a degree of pain. Ultimately, Minniecon sums up
the heart space of transitional identities as she reflects:

Treading gently when it comes to identity is vital to me. Gentle to oth-

ers, gentle to myself. Our identities can give us so much strength but
also tire and weaken us depending on the type of identities we hold
and how they are reflected in what is happening around us and also
within us.

This synopsis charts the journey of 20 individuals across philosophical, aes-

thetic, ethnic, gendered, contested and subjective domains. It is very much
about appreciating the transitional processes and forces at work around us.
It is about being clear but gentle, as Minniecon reminds us. As we globalise,
we pluralise, and this comes with both winners and losers. Once solid iden-
tities are now collapsing under the pressure of new intimacies, new flows of
people and also of values and disruptive experiences. This identity stress, of
course, is felt most by those once immune to such forces.

Transitional Selves
Today we are all transitional selves. But what does this mean? To transition
in this context means to move from zones of higher certitude into zones of
contingency and uncertainty. This volume, therefore, is also an attempt to
approach this question of what it means to be transitional selves. Again,
there are no answers here, but there are reflections on why identity isn’t
what it used to be and what this whole ‘mess’ is about.
The idea for this volume was conceived in a café in Bengaluru, India, two
years before the advent of COVID-19, yet this pandemic has its roots in the
intersection of traditional dietary practices of peoples whose identities span
tribal and traditional lifeways and post-industrial consumerist processes,
where the consumption of wildlife has become a distorted parody of pre-
modern/pre-capitalist dietary (identity) practices. Today the consumption
of wildlife in China is a form of resistance to hegemonic food practices. In
China this practice speaks of affluence and ethnic identity politics; in Africa,
where the same practice is the source of the Ebola virus, it speaks of poverty
and the failure of the global economic system to ensure a just distribution
of wealth.
 Introduction 7
Standing as we do in the shadow of COVID-19, we are forced to recog-
nise that once you could spend your entire life in the secure arms of your
culture and not need to worry about the dilemma of self and other. This
issue has become increasingly complex and disturbing in our times of global
flows and ensuing identity politics. The upside of this process is that we
all need to do the inner work on self that is required to live in a plural but
globally connected world. The downside is that for many, such inner work
is too much, and they retreat into fundamentalisms and violence in order
to protect an imagined singular ‘self’. We seek to dispel the myth that there
ever was a simple unitary identity and to examine various representations
of the Self–Other conundrum in contexts as diverse as geopolitics and the
representations of nationalist identity through to ecological representations
of the self as embedded in a world that has always been plural and informed
by encounters with significant others, both within and outside of the anthro-
pocentric circles that constitute the human context.
Timothy Morton (2016) has argued that there is an excess of Being that
is hidden within all things – not just human beings. This excess means that
there is a radical finitude that disrupts identity as given and, he reminds us,
this disruption is not restricted to being human. Following this logic, there
is a deep dependency on the other – both human others and non-human
others. This presents us with an ontological challenge with which we as a
species are currently struggling.

The Counter-Revolutionary
This assertion by Morton in no way makes him a mystic, though mystics no
doubt will concur with his emphasis on the hiddenness of an ‘essential’ iden-
tity. This concurrence is based on parallel though deeply entwined ontologi-
cal assumptions. Morton’s struggle, and it is a key theme for us to consider,
is with the human need to essentialise self and other when all the evidence
points to our complicity and creativity as constantly emergent selves in com-
munity/solidarity with the world around us. Bruno Latour offers us another
insight in regard to the struggles around identity today.

In practice, we are all counter-revolutionaries, trying to minimize the

consequences of a revolution that has taken place without us, against
us, and, at the same time, through us.
(2017, p. 40)

Latour is speaking here to the tension inherent to the culture which both
shields our vulnerability whilst extending our creative possibilities. The
counter-revolutionary is prepared to die for her cause, just as the revolution-
ary is, having felt stifled all their life by the oppression of entrenched tradi-
tions of entrapment/enslavement. However we look at this, what is clear
is that the essentialised self is under siege and in transition. As transitional
8 Marcus Bussey et al.
selves, we are all called to engage with the work and struggle involved in
imagining and enacting emergent self–other possibilities as a matter of
urgency. Our humanity is transforming, the safe but illusory divide between
subject and object is collapsing, and a new humanity is emerging. This is
both a painfully solitary and excitingly collective process. Loren Eiseley,
who felt this pain intensely noted how our solitude, a product of being
conscious, was linked to our capacity to love beyond the constraints of the
finite. As he notes:

To the day of our deaths we exist in an inner solitude that is linked to

the nature of life itself. Even as we project love and affection upon oth-
ers we endure a loneliness which is the price of all individual conscious-
ness – the price of living.
(Eiseley, 1998, p. 48)

The Price of Living

Today this ‘price of living’ is experiencing a strange inflation in which iden-
tity no longer can mask the vulnerability that Eiseley was so aware of. In
our loneliness, humanity is caught in self-destructive patterns that seek to
hold onto the modernist myth that identity is the individual’s assertion of
control over their circumstances. Yet all the signs are that we are out of con-
trol. COVID-19 is making this painfully obvious. If we make a list of other
symptoms, we have: environmental destruction (ecocide); endemic global
violence against women, children, ethnicities and nature; economic dispari-
ties getting more extreme; the destruction, subjugation and appropriation
of other ways of knowing/speaking (epistemicide); suicide too is at all-time
highs around the planet. The naked ego is exposed, and all the cultural scaf-
folding generated to sustain the illusion of control is coming undone.
New emergent properties of ‘self’ are taking shape and rescripting old
stories. Perhaps we children of the Neolithic need to look over our shoul-
ders and draw on the collective Palaeolithic sense of solidarity that Morton
is describing. The chasm here is profound. Neolithic practices of domesti-
cation and urbanisation separated human consciousness from nature, set-
ting the culture in a false but convincing opposition to the natural world.
Solidarity is to be found in the current collapse of this separation. It is being
forced on us by climate change, COVID-19 and the growing awareness that
seeing the earth as a resource is no longer serving us. We need to embrace a
partnership mentality as Riane Eisler (1995) calls it. Partnership sits at the
heart of a set of emergent narratives that are touched on in various ways
across this collection of essays.
Fortunately, there are enabling narratives to be found in many tradi-
tions such as those offered by Eastern and indigenous people over mil-
lennia. Our humanity is tight upon us with thinkers and activists such as
Charles Eisenstein (2018) turning to new narratives, reworkings of earlier
 Introduction 9
co-creative understandings of embedded being – interbeing as Thích Nhất
Hạnh calls it (Hạnh, 1988). This is a Neohumanist moment, to use P.R.
Sarkar’s (Bussey, 2006; Sarkar, 1982) useful term, in which open under-
standings of being emerge to challenge clearly inadequate identity tropes.
Thus, the black American critical theorist and Buddhist scholar bell hooks
(lowercase is intentional) offers an antidote to Loren Eiseley’s ‘inner solitude’
and ‘loneliness’, arguing ‘Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of
loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them
as a means of escape’ (2000, p. 140). That’s why to dwell with ‘identity’ is
to enter a delicate and multidimensional universe, full of controversies and
polemics and possibly great satisfactions. To ‘dwell’, as Heidegger argued, is
to be present, to find meaning, community and strength in being. Essentially
the struggle of identity work is the struggle of self-acceptance, both at the
individual and communal levels. Identity fatigue arises when cultural habits
are destabilised and to paraphrase Marx ‘all that is solid melts into air’.
It is worth noting that this condition is not solely a current issue. The fif-
teenth century north Indian poet and mystic Kabir recognised this and spoke
often of it in his songs and poems. Kabir himself was a complex character
being born into a Muslim family and then becoming a disciple of a Hindu
teacher; he was a weaver by profession but also a mystic who is claimed by
Hindus and Muslims. As a pragmatic spiritual seeker, he practised a form of
‘social research’ which was often communicated via poetry and song. Thus,
we have in one of his couplets the following observation: ‘I went in search
of negative identities, but found myself as the most negative’. Today his cou-
plets are still sung in many places in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan with
faith and reverence. For Kabir, identity is not a fixed thing, and it appears to
be opaque. In fact, one may never come to know what is actually behind this
opacity. Yet it is the search to get behind the mystery of ‘Who am I?’ that
has fascinated mystics of all ages. This is why the practice of plurality is most
welcome to these life seekers, as the practice of plurality acknowledges one’s
ignorance with honesty. The famous expression of Jesus, when crucified,
appears to be about this honesty as he declared, ‘Forgive them Father, for
they know not what they do’. This ignorance of self sits at the heart of this
question and asserts a space for mystery and the ongoing research it demands
of us all (Bussey & Sannum, 2017). So, the modern context is perhaps not so
far removed from that of Kabir. Yet, the speed and complexity of the world
certainly amplifies this confusion; it also democratises it. We are now all held
to account. COVID-19 touches us all, as does climate change, stretching
identity in strange new ways, though it must be acknowledged that the poor
and marginal remain more vulnerable to the effects of such ‘natural’ forces.

Strangeness
The strangeness of the subject is increasingly apparent. It is freaking people out
that their stable ‘i-ness’ is fragmenting. Of course, for some, non-conforming
10 Marcus Bussey et al.
gender identities, for instance, this fragmentation is welcome and liberat-
ing. But for those who benefitted from the authority and prestige bestowed
by a stable identity, this is bad news! hooks calls those with the most to
gain from this stability, members of the ‘white supremacist capitalist patri-
archy’ hegemony (1995, pp. 185–188). You do not have to be a billionaire
to belong to this group – even the most socio-economically disadvantaged
white men or women can still be invested in this worldview, sacrificing their
own futures for the anorexic comforts of the familiar and stable.
The consequences of this strangeness are obvious: political fights between
right and left, progressivists and conservatives. Each claims the moral high
ground and the authoritative image of the future – a singular future made in
their own image. This battle now sees the rise of conservative thought and
influence across the planet, be it in the ‘developed’ or ‘developing’ world. In
this context, the question of ‘who am I’ and the search for self-knowledge
have definitely become the surprise visitor at this raucous party. We can no
longer escape dealing with such uncomfortable issues in the face of a world
that calls the authenticity of the self into action. Post-human, non-human,
trans-human and Neohumanist futures now arise as possible scenarios.
Facing such a moving horizon we experience the vertiginous. We are at
sea either as literal refugees or metaphorically as those who find the world
around them strange, their home no longer familiar to them. In this case
we have moved, been removed and been cut off as a migrant in a new land.
Everything is now upside down. Vilém Flusser, an immigrant who fled the
Nazis’ rise, describes this experience brilliantly:

Migrating is a creative yet painful situation [...]. Those who leave their
homeland (by necessity or decision, and both are difficult to separate) suf-
fer. Because a thousand threads bind them to the motherland, and when
they are amputated, it is as if a surgical intervention has taken place.
(Flusser in Leão, 1985, p. 45)

That’s because to migrate is usually a strong threshold of identity shift

because it brings to the surface the lack of a common culture, food, hab-
its, friends and family and, sometimes, even language or physical traces.
Suddenly what was familiar becomes strange and totally new, as Flusser
continues:

When I was expelled from Prague (or when I made the courageous deci-
sion to flee), I experienced the collapse of the universe. What happened
is that I confused my inner self with the space outside. I suffered the
pains of amputated wires.
(ibid.)

In this sense, refugees are the most eminent group, where the loss of identity
is extreme: they not only move countries but also escape the total destruction
 Introduction 11
of their own homeland. However, this impulse of moving is not only an
impulse for survival but also an act of hope, as is well described by Flusser
when he managed to escape from the Nazi regime.

But later, in the London of the first years of the war, and with the pre-
monition of the horror of the camps, I began to realize that such pains
were not related to surgical operation, but to childbirth.
(ibid.)

The hope of rebirth in a better reality is what makes the clash of identities
manageable when facing the terror of the new. And that’s where the fear of
losing one’s identity becomes its strength, and thus Flusser concludes:

I realized that those cut wires had nourished me, and that I was being
designed for freedom. I was taken over by the vertigo of freedom,
which is manifested by the reversal of the question ‘free from what?’
into ‘free to do what?’ And so, we migrants all are: beings taken by
vertigo.
(ibid.)

Conclusion
Freedom, therefore, sits at the heart of this inquiry. To be taken by vertigo is
to explore the limits of the condition of identity. There is a praxis of libera-
tion here that emerges from a sense of possibility: how do multiple identities
amplify this possibility? Turning to the non-West for instance we encounter
Kabir and many others. They of course are not alone in seeking to peer
behind the veneer of post-Palaeolithic cultures. But they represent a spe-
cialised and vibrant engagement with the praxis of liberation, what Laura
Harjo (2019) calls ‘indigenous futurity’. The mystics, the Sufis, the saints
and indigenous people worldwide belonging to different cultures are life
seekers, who are not very comfortable with a self-asserting identity in the
traditional sense. In shaping a praxis of liberation they insist on breaking up
their individual identities; they do not fear this loss. They wish to become
Other, to welcome relatedness over separate ego-being. By acknowledging
the primacy of the identity of others, generally associated with various power
relations, this mediation does not get addicted to hegemonic principles and
consequently disavows them. Further, it respects and values the existence
of all different identities simultaneously co-existing, cutting across barriers
like class, ethnicity, culture and so on. Such praxis, in a strife-ridden world,
is crucial as it frees us to explore a wide set of co-creative and inclusive
selves. The advantage of this is that one can explore one’s unknowability in
relation to the Other. This is an emergent reality and there is no going back.
It is clear that we have arrived at the threshold of a plurified world that calls
the subject to reflect on the quest for identity as a crucial aspect of life.
12 Marcus Bussey et al.
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Futures Studies, 10(4), 39–44.
Bussey, M., and Sannum, M. (2017). Towards a Rationality of Mystery: The Calling
of Robust Ignorance. In A. K. Giri (Ed.), Pathways of Creative Research Towards
a Festival of Dialogues (pp. 463–467). Delhi: Primus Books
Eiseley, L. (1998). The Invisible Pyramid. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Eisenstein, C. (2018). Climate: A New Story. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Eisler, R. (1995). The Chalice and the Blade: Our history our future. San Francisco:
Harper.
Hạnh, T. N. (1988). The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the
Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra. Berkeley: Parallax Press.
Harjo, L. (2019). Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity. Tucson: University
of Arizona Press.
hooks, b. (1995). Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Holt.
hooks, b. (2000). All About Love: New Visions. New York: Harper.
Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature.
London: Polity Press.
Leão, M. L. (1985). Flusser e a liberdade de pensar, ou Flusser e uma certa geração
60. In V. Flusser (Ed.), Filosofia da Caixa Preta: Ensaios para uma futura filosofia
da fotografia. São Paulo: Hucitec.
Morton, T. (2017). Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People. London &
New York: Verso Books.
Mozzini-Alister, C. (2021). Does Social Media Have Limits? Bodies of Light & the
Desire for Omnipresence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sarkar, P. R. (1982). The Liberation of Intellect: Neohumanism. Calcutta: Ananda
Marga Publications.
Part 1

Liminal Identities

Part 1 of this text explores the liminality of identity. It accepts, following

Foucault, “The individual is not a fixed reality … but a historical, cultural and
linguistic construction (or fiction), which comes about in the process of speak-
ing, acting and thinking” (Huijer, 1999, p. 62). In short transitional identities
can be understood as personal practices and responses to the seismic shifts
shaking the human world at the moment. Such shifts have been unfolding for
decades and collectively humanity has turned its back, denying the realities
closing in on them in regard to climate change, global poverty and the capture
of democratic processes by the venal, the corporate and the egoistic snake oil
sales folk who tell us what we – the voter, the consumer – most want to hear.
We must now learn hard lessons. And such lessons begin with identity stress
in the face of the converging pressures cited earlier in this text.
The chapters by Bussey, Clammer, Scott, van den Akker and Douglas all
work from the understanding that we enact ourselves in multiple settings
that constitute a plurified world of emergent possibilities and terrors. It also
acknowledges that this is a living, ongoing and creative process. Furthermore,
it is also a collective act, as our identities evolve co-creatively in response to
all that is occurring around us, to the living generative spaces that we, for the
most part, unconsciously inhabit. To be liminal is to acknowledge that we
inhabit such “between spaces” characterised by an inter-subjective ferment.
The transitional self is a moving signifier in which the tension between the
plural and the singular (Selves/Self) is calling forth the new whilst recognis-
ing the common yearning of humanity to resolve the inner and outer storms
via some act that will never come but that still haunts our dreams.
In this we are reminded of a few lines from poet Wendell Berry (1998,
p. 57) in which the liminal self stands at the window, looking out/in: “The
man of the window/lives at the edge/knowing the approach/ of what must
be, joy/ and dread”.

References
Berry, W. (1998). The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. New York: Counterpoint.
Huijer, M. (1999). The aesthetics of existence in the work of Michel Foucault.
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 25(2), 61–85. doi:10.1177/019145379902500204

DOI: 10.4324/9781003396246-2
2 ‘Who Am I?’
Vertigo and the Identity Threshold
Marcus Bussey

So, who am I? This is a question for which there should not be a conclusive
answer if we wish to travel lightly over the land and delve deep into the
appreciation of being an embodied being with a self-awareness that mud-
dies the simplicity of Being, yet also creates the opportunity for wonder,
dreaming and becoming. Scepticism is key here as certainty around identity,
and which self or selves an individual or community chooses to privilege,
generally leads to communal violence and intolerance. I am sure this is why
Udupi Rajagopalacharya Ananthamurti asks and argues:

Anyway, who am I? People like Basava and Kabir, who put them-
selves through a rigorous search for divinity, exhausted themselves,
were renewed, and experienced the formless Brahman. Yet, they were
sceptical.
(Ananthamurthy, 2016, p. 65)

Much of the rush to reinscribe essentialised, one might say fossilised, iden-
tities today lies in our suffering from identity fatigue. Who am I? evokes
so many possible answers: I am woman; I am man; I am Human; I am
Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Indigenous, Taoist, Confucian, Zoroastrian,
Jewish and all the subdivisions available to us; I am transgender, Gay,
Lesbian, Heterosexual or Bi; I am Australian, Indian, American, French,
Italian, Brazilian or whatever geopolitical/cultural label you like; I am a
mind in a body; I am a thinking animal; I am a spiritual being having a
human existence; I am my avatar; I am a footballer, yogi, tennis player; I am
a businesswoman, professor, road sweeper; I am a mother, a father, a lover,
a bipolar Hells Angels member; I am a vegetarian, or a vegan, or a paleo,
or a breatharian: I am a Brexit voter, a neo-Nazi, a democrat or republican;
I am a universalist, a Jedi or a cultist; and so the identity cascade goes on.
There is little wonder that we are feeling the identity pinch. Our age is a
time of disorientation. It is, as Byung-Chul Han (2017, p. 28ff) playfully
suggests, an age of ‘whizzing’ in which stable identity no longer holds centre
stage and with this comes a loss of coherent narratives. Time is fractured
and identity loses coherence. Vertigo is a feature of identity today and it

DOI: 10.4324/9781003396246-3
16 Marcus Bussey
is not going away. We are, I believe, on a threshold, an identity threshold
in which fundamental changes to our relationship with self are underway
(Bussey, 2020). Chaosmos impinges everywhere, and the resulting terror
felt by many is pushing identity into fundamentalist, righteous and brittle
corners. And it all starts with this identity cascade I just touched on.

Our Fraudulent Republic

Once the factory was the dominant metaphor for social order. It offered
a powerful heterotopic vision of order and productivity (Hetherington,
1997). Today the supermarket has replaced the factory. We have become
consumers of identity. The rise of the Avatar cuts across psycho-social space
in which traditional consumption is now extended to the virtual. As con-
sumers of identity, we are also products of our consumption. ‘We are what
we eat’, ‘I shop therefore I am’ and so on. Perhaps today, ‘I click/touch the
screen therefore I am’ is the dominant meme? The entirety of life has become
an endless surreal supermarket where what we purchase and consume is the
material representation of the political, economic, institutional and commu-
nity systems that we buy into. These in turn float upon viscous amalgams of
beliefs, assumptions, values, worldviews, cultural affiliations, aesthetic per-
suasions and ideological and epistemological positions that legitimate our
system choices. And, yes there is more, underpinning all this are the deep
stories we tell ourselves and others about what the world is like and why I
am who I am. To be without a story is to be afloat in the great chaotic swell
of the Chaosmos. Buyer beware in such a context, because as Vilém Flusser
notes: ‘The supermarket is a fraudulent republic’ (2013, p. 60).
For the affluent and aspiring affluent alike this world is a veritable cor-
nucopia. The pent-up energy of human creativity has unleashed, through
the mechanism of industrialisation, the world of mass consumption. For
those on the winning side of industrialisation, this abundance is found in
the supermarket which functions as an impotent agora. As Flusser drily
acknowledges, this is no Garden of Eden. Rather our lives groan under the
weight of superfluity, in which the hunger of those denied the supermarket
by being born in the alleys that feed into this wonderland but do not benefit
from it, is mirrored by the satiation of those locked within the aisles of the
supermarket. Superfluity breeds anxiety. For the hungry, there is always the
double stress of scarcity and the unrequited love felt towards a lover, the
supermarket, that denies them. For the satiated, there is quadruple stress:
(1) the fear of losing access to the supermarket; (2) the guilt of exclud-
ing others from the supermarket; (3) anxiety at being forced to share its
abundance; and (4) the constant need to choose from a seemingly endless
variety of products, densely immersed in complex and competing arrays
of colour, scents and sounds. The supermarket promises all this and more,
appealing and jostling for attention. And now it has gone virtual so that
our desires and choices are seemingly endless given the omnipresence of
 ‘Who Am I?’ 17
online advertising, Amazon, eBay and Facebook and so many other outlets.
We are captives of what Douglas Rushkoff called digiphrenia, the ‘faux
present of digital bombardment’ (2013, p. 69). This restless churning, the
echo chamber politics of the ‘fraudulent republic’, saturates the lives of
both the rich and the poor today. It is the source of our own desperate
alienation from both our inner life and from the entangled communities we
share this planet with. Camila Mozzini touches on this in her self-study of
the mediation of consciousness through the hapticity of the touch screen
which invites us into the illusory, seemingly endless, world of the fraudu-
lent republic:

It was only inciting me, seducing me, sweetly whispering to me in

every outdoor television commercial, newspaper ad, product pack-
age, YouTube video, and advertisement generated based on my digital
traces: ‘you can be happier, you can be more than your body, you can
be unlimited if you are connected to what we are offering you: but the
choice is yours’.
(2018, p. np)

Yet choice is an extraordinary gift. It brings with it the possibility of self-

awareness, if only we could see it that way, and involves the recognition
(conscious or unconscious) that by choosing we are becoming. Loren Eiseley
saw this darkly, with sombre shadows but also magically and in every choos-
ing the world is created anew:

Man [sic] is himself, like the universe he inhabits, like the demoniacal
stirrings of the ooze from which he sprang, a tale of desolations …
But out of such desolation emerges the awesome freedom to choose –
to choose beyond the narrowly circumscribed circle that delimits the
animal being. In that widening ring of human choice, chaos and order
renew their symbolic struggle in the role of titans. They contend for the
destiny of the world.
(1994, pp. 88–89)

Cracks in History
Calvin Luther Martin approaches this question through the cracks in his-
tory that allow one to dream, question and shape-shift. Part historian,
part shaman, part poet, he sees differently. Asking questions that many
have been asking of course, from philosophers (Aurobindo, 1982; Butler,
2004; Deleuze & Guattari, 1994; Heidegger, 1962; Sarkar, 1993) to scien-
tists (Capra, 1984; Latour, 1991; Sheldrake, 1988), educators (Das, 2007;
Doll, 1986; Orr, 2002) to visionaries and poets (Eiseley, 1962; Hạnh, 1988;
Tagore, 1931), but turning to the native landscapes of the Palaeolithic as
a provocation for modern complacencies. He (1992, p. 83) describes the
18 Marcus Bussey
problem as Self–Non-self – the ‘primordial fear of human existence’, which
became, according to Martin, the hallmark of Neolithic being:

The tools of our civilization are artifacts of the neolithic imagination

which succumbed to the illusion of self/non-self. I have called it an illu-
sion; I could just as rightly call it a fear … Hunter-gatherers confronted
and dismissed this fear daily. Farming civlizations and pastoralists on
the other hand armed themselves in the death-grip of it. For they had
lost, not Eden, as they claimed, but the discipline and ability to imagine,
to envision all as self in the vision quest.
(italics added; 1992, pp. 82–83)

Martin brings a historian’s sensitivity to rupture, pattern and emergence

in this understanding of the wound of self/non-self. This wound was the
demand for order, the bulwark to chaos, achieved by stepping out of rela-
tionship with the world around us. For pre-agricultural peoples, there is
no separation; self and other are co-creatives in the symbiotic real. This
real assumes, as the term suggests, co-investment in the real; it suggests
that there is no clear inside/outside divide between consciousness and being.
The symbiotic real assumes flow, flux and uncertainty along with relation-
ship as the building blocks of any viable sense of ‘being-in-the-world’. The
symbiotic real is the workplace of Chaosmos. The agricultural and modern
self sought to stabilise the relationships of self–non-self through generating
absolutes (gods, states, hierarchies, religions), severing the fearful subject
(you and I) from the fearsome object (you and them); splitting the inner
from the outer in such a way that we could control that which threatened
us. We could shore up a mystery and fabricate a unitary identity. This split
and accompanying identity also meant we could manipulate the world
around us (Harari, 2015; Watson, 2006). Most of recorded human history
has been about the various experiments conducted by societies, cultures and
civilisations in the name of maintaining and leveraging the split between
self and non-self. Martin feels we made a very bad deal in this regard. Yet,
living as we do with the legacy and momentum of the self/non-self what can
we do? Perhaps we look for an out-of-focus philosophy (Bussey, 2019) of
the between, one that allows for paradox, liminality, intimacy even aporia.

Perhaps
I like John Caputo’s (2013) powerful theological work on ‘Perhaps’ in this
regard. He has much to say, but in the following Caputo helps with the issue
of an out-of-focus philosophy:

‘Perhaps’ is a certain anarche that issues not in a street corner anarchism

or violent lawlessness, but in a radical, creative, and even sacred anar-
chy. Our lives are inscribed within a bottomlessness that no theoretical
 ‘Who Am I?’ 19
eye can fathom, in virtue of which we are ever exposed to time and
tide and chance. What exists is neither protected from on high nor con-
signed to evil or violence or to a monstrous abyss that will swallow us
whole like a tragic fate. What exists is inscribed within an aleatory ele-
ment, exposed to an unavoidable chance and contingency which keeps
the future open and unfinished.
(2013, p. 261)

The self/non-self cannot be fully theorised. It is an intimate part of the land-

scape, and it is pushing us around as it has since at least Neolithic times
if we accept Martin’s chronology. It is also pushing us towards an iden-
tity threshold because we have both old and new players in this landscape:
polarising politics; a range of precarious globalisations; complex layered
(confused but hopeful) identities facing off with simplistic (and terrified)
essentialised identities; anthropogenic climate change; COVID-19, resource
depletion; rampant and corrosive social media; mass migrations; ethnic
violence; nation statism on the retreat but fighting back; and ideological
fundamentalists seeking to re-establish their power over others. The whole
mess is linked to the Anthropocene (Haraway, 2015; McNeill, 2016), which
combines to cast big scary shadows, think Eiseley, over our emergent global
civilisation and pose a set of problems we seem unable to even contemplate,
let alone engage. The default position is to fall back on past patterns such
as totalitarian and/or popular authoritarianism, scapegoating and general
denial. Such an approach is to offer a moral identity premised on non-
negotiable elements such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Modi’s
‘Hindutva’ and Trump’s ‘America First’. Adopting essentialised selves fails
to recognise – cannot recognise – that the ‘evil’ out there reflects what U.R.
Ananthamurthy called the ‘evil’ inside us (2016, pp. 10, 20–21).
There is no capacity, from an essentialist position, for the reflexive mech-
anism required to do anything but react as we have been programmed by
media and the barrage of fear messages on regular and social media. Thus,
Vilém Flusser reminds us that, in our heavily mediated reality, we become
flows of sensations in which ‘there is no memory, no interiority … there
is no “I”’ (2013, p. 110). What we have are faux memory and emotional
agitation. And this feels endless. The temptation is to theorise the condition
via hyperbole, which is a rather satisfying aesthetic response and one that
Flusser is adept at. For instance, and I admit to enjoying this very much,
Flusser asserts that we are witnessing

‘The emergence of the coprophiliac sciences, the study of the undi-

gested.’ Psychoanalysis, archaeology, and etymology; the search for
the ‘sources’ and for the roots, are an example of this. There is the
emergence of coprophiliac movements that aim to recycle the shit. The
ecological movement is an example of this. The other is the recycling
of specialists. The important element in this is the restructuring of our
20 Marcus Bussey
thought and of our activity. Since we are channels with mouth and
anus, we think and act cyclically. No longer: ‘past-present-future,’ but
‘past-resent-future-past.’ No longer: ‘nature transformed into culture’
but ‘nature transformed into shit, transformed into nature.’ Such cycli-
cal thought and action are symptoms of a semi-conscious interiority in
relation to our re-programming into feedback channels.
(2013, p. 111)

Here we see Flusser subsuming culture into nature, pointing to the way cul-
ture recycles its own shit – and that includes our identities and contingent
fears, aspirations, dreams and nightmares. This pseudo-cultural melange, a
term adopted from the work of Indian philosopher/guru Prabhat Rainjan
Sarkar (1987), is rich with imagined pasts that become imagined futures,
and repetitive (cultic) actions become who we are based on the algorithms
of consciousness that structure thought and activity. There is no identity,
only flows and functions. Flusser’s cybernetic vision leaves aside the prob-
lematic self/non-self that Martin is pointing to. It is this absence that I feel.
Flusser has offered a richly diagnostic appraisal, but something is missing
in my quest to understand this critical moment of identity threshold. For
Flusser, ‘Who am I?’ is a non-question. It misses the point as we are pro-
grammed–reprogrammed flows in which everything is supplied by an exter-
nal apparatus that is reflected/refracted on the inner subject. The bridge
to insight for me lies not in an eviscerated homo sacer but in an intimate
theorising in which both words and senses get involved.

Tipping Point
Luciano Floridi, in surveying this mess, suggests that ‘at some stage it is
easier to replace the whole system – change paradigm, to put it more dra-
matically – than to keep improving one part of it’ (2014, p. 29). Admittedly
he was talking about floppy disks, but the example can easily be amplified.
In a volatile system such as that described by Flusser, the nature of com-
plexity, the dense programmes and flows, the energy regimes that underpin
the economics and sustainability of the system and the capacity for human
consciousness to keep up reach a threshold in which we either collapse, a la
Jared Diamond’s (2005) thesis on collapse, or we leapfrog to a new order
of complexity, as in David Christian’s (2004, 2008) Big History model that
posits a series of such thresholds since the Big Bang (Chaisson, 2006). The
self/non-self struggles to manage this intensity. It’s getting angry, mean
and frustrating (think President Trump’s wall obsession). It is looking for
simplicity in the arms of carefully managed ignorance, hyper-distraction,
pseudo-historical memories of the good old days and scape-goatism on a
grand scale.
However this story is told, it is clear we are approaching a tipping point
(Gladwell, 2002), and depending on where you sit, this is a good thing. It
 ‘Who Am I?’ 21
is not good for polar bears, or Bangladeshi fisher folk or Australian forests;
it is not good for the marginal and vulnerable at any scale of consideration;
but it is good in that the tipping point heralds an emergent awareness of
expanded human potential via an open reconsideration of the question of
the self/non-self. We are being forced back to the Neolithic table to look at
our options again, create new forms to dream by (Bussey, 2017) and recon-
sider the question: who am I?
Let’s be clear though, we are being forced to do this. Timothy Morton
puts it this way: ‘One doesn’t act awareness, it happens to one. It seems to
have its own kind of existence, from its own side. It is not something you
manufacture’ (2017, p. 186). For me, this is an awareness, emergent, deep
and rich, of us being invited (forced) to re-enter the self/non-self-space of
the Palaeolithic. Awareness, having its own side, has agency! It works on
us in creative, rich oft-times violent ways. Such a space demands a nested
individualism in which the world is re-enchanted, everything changes and
a ‘common ground’ emerges on the fringes, in the gaps, as Rob Cowen
beautifully describes when recounting his sojourn in the wild at the edge of
a Yorkshire town: ‘All around is the feeling of confluence, of things happen-
ing just outside my vision’ (2015, p. 39).

Madness
This of course can be maddening. Especially if the feeling is all consuming.
In our mediated society the question of ‘Who am I?’ elicits such a feeling.
We stand in our kitchen, cooking a delicious curry and out comes the smart-
phone. Time for a selfie to share. ‘Here I am cooking a delicious curry’, we
share this as if to say to both ourselves and our tribe: ‘Hey, I’m Okay. I am
cooking a curry’. Such efforts are compulsive attempts to stave off the deep
uncertainty that perhaps either there is nothing more to me than the act of
cooking or there is so much more to me than the act of cooking. This cultic,
recursive, compulsive act is an attempt at driving off the ‘feeling of a conflu-
ence of things happening just outside my vision’; distancing the fragile ego
from things that are greater, more terror inducing and more extraordinary
than anything I can possibly imagine.
The fictional character Frenhofer, in Balzac’s marvellous tale The
Unknown Masterpiece, illustrates this for us (Ashton, 1980). For Balzac:

Frenhofer is a passionate enthusiast, who sees above and beyond other

painters. He has meditated profoundly on color, and the absolute truth
of line; but by the way of much research he has come to doubt the very
existence of the objects of his search.
(Balzac 1846, pp. 23–24)

This doubt in the ‘very existence of objects’ is the product of a liminal madness
for Frenhofer. It is sublime in its intoxicating power over the painter. Every
22 Marcus Bussey
time he approaches his ‘perfect’ painting of the courtesan Catherine Lescault,
he discovers some element that is yet imperfect. To him, the woman on the
canvass is his lover. Yet she is ever elusive. She reflects back to him some
essential yearning for perfection, for the triumph of the Cosmos over Chaos.
Yet this very triumph is mysteriously elusive, maddeningly so. The painting is
persona entangled in form, it is the refraction of identity as it struggles to hold
the world together. There is eros, love and crisis here. As Frenhofer declares:

For ten years I have lived with her; she is mine, mine alone; she loves
me. Has she not smiled at me, at each stroke of the brush upon the
canvas? She has a soul – the soul that I have given her. She would blush
if any eyes but mine should rest on her. To exhibit her! Where is the
husband, the lover so vile as to bring the woman he loves to dishonour?
When you paint a picture for the court, you do not put your whole soul
into it; to courtiers you sell lay figures duly coloured. My painting is no
painting, it is a sentiment, a passion.
(ibid., pp. 23–24)

Do not be fooled, however. What Frenhofer sees is not what his colleagues
Porbus and Poussin see. When at last they are allowed by Frenhofer to see
his masterpiece, they are shocked. Poussin sees only ruin and chaos:

I can see nothing there but confused masses of colour and a multitude
of fantastical lines that go to make a dead wall of paint.
(ibid., p. 29)

But the older painter, Porbus, interjects:

‘We are mistaken, look!’ said Porbus.

In a corner of the canvas, as they came nearer, they distinguished a bare foot
emerging from the chaos of colour, half-tints and vague shadows that made
up a dim, formless fog. Its living delicate beauty held them spellbound. This
fragment that had escaped an incomprehensible, slow and gradual destruc-
tion seemed to them like the Parian marble torso of some Venus emerging
from the ashes of a ruined town.
‘There is a woman beneath,’ exclaimed Porbus, calling Poussin’s atten-
tion to the coats of paint with which the old artist had overlaid and
concealed his work in the quest of perfection.
Both artists turned involuntarily to Frenhofer. They began to have
some understanding, vague though it was, of the ecstasy in which he lived.
(ibid., pp. 29–30)

This ecstasy is of course hypnotic, as all culture is. It appears as mad-

ness (Frenhofer) when out of step with the dominant culture (Porbus and
 ‘Who Am I?’ 23
Poussin). The foot in the painting is the link between the two worlds, both
concerned with reality and representation, with the tension between sem-
blance and an assumed reality. Porbus and Poussin are prepared to accept a
compromise: let sleeping dogs lie, reality is not the business of the painter.
Representation is.

For painters, practise and observation are everything; and when theories
and poetical ideas begin to quarrel with the brushes, the end is doubt.
(ibid., p. 19)

Frenhofer, on the other hand, would disagree. He inhabits, as does Cowen

exploring the edges of his town, an extended reality. One that is murkier
and deeper than the objective (scientific) gaze of his friends. This challenges
both those taking selfies and those trying, as Frenhofer does, to represent it.
This is the world of myth, magic and mysticism. And also, as David Abrams
notes, an ecological, sensuous, phenomenology:

the living world – this ambiguous realm that we experience in anger

and joy, in grief and in love – is both the soil in which all our sciences
are rooted and the rich humus into which their results return, whether
as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world,
charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the
vital and dark ground of all our objectivity.
(1996, p. 34)

Frenhofer’s experience is both spiritual and sensuous. He is searching for

the elusive, the elemental link between representation and being; object and
subject; and between identity and experience. Identity is the representation
of self to the world (selfie), whilst experience challenges that representation
on a daily basis. Thus, Frenhofer says to Porbus:

Ah! my good friend, there is still something more to learn, and you will
use up a great deal of chalk and cover many a canvas before you will
learn it. Yes, truly, a woman carries her head in just such a way, so she
holds her garments gathered into her hand; her eyes grow dreamy and
soft with that expression of meek sweetness, and even so the quivering
shadow of the lashes hovers upon her cheeks. It is all there, and yet it
is not there. What is lacking? A nothing, but that nothing is everything.
(ibid., p. 9)

So, the artist’s madness rests in his pursuit of this nothing and in his rejec-
tion of the compromise most of us make when it comes to ‘reality’ and our
place in it. Like painters and their brushes, we construct representations of
a world out there, and of ourselves in it, through ‘practice and observation’.
Think Bourdieu’s habitus (2005). We practice selfhood, and this requires
24 Marcus Bussey
otherhood. This means we situate ourselves in relation to an ‘other’, or
more precisely a host of ‘others’. For many, this might suggest a transcend-
ent Kantian self, vis-à-vis the world. Such a self correlates data and weaves
it into information, in order to generate fields of meaning. Yet there is
more. We need more. We need the nothing that Frenhofer is obsessed with.
The nothing is there to disturb the easy distinction between inside and out-
side. The nothing points to that hollow feeling we might experience when
we try to push aside culture, to peer beneath its surface as Frenhofer did,
to risk madness and chaos in the pursuit of nothing. The negative space
that speaks of something greater than ourselves. So, we turn away from it
and focus instead on cultural forms that reinforce an ontological position
that pushes up against that question of I-ness. ‘Who am I?’ That eternal
disturber of the peace.

We Are All Steppenwolves

If we follow the perceptual spell of Balzac’s story, we begin to approach
contemporary issues of identity stress. The reader may point out that
Frenhofer’s obsession was external to him, but I’d respond: no! His inner
world was projected onto that canvass, which became, a la the magic of
Oscar Wilde, a Dorian Gray issue; or via Kafka, a Metamorphosis problem.
Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf haunts the fringes of consciousness ‘just out-
side my vision’, as immanent madness. We are all steppenwolves! The issue
is that the separation between painter and product is illusory. They are sym-
biotically linked. Identity is built out of the cumulative and repeated actions
of individuals; formed in the ‘between’ that functions as both workshop and
sacred space in the production of identity. Balzac’s genius is that his charac-
ter gestured towards a collapse in the 19th century’s belief in the scientific
real. In a way that would have surprised him, he foresaw in the artistic and
political struggles of his day, the ingredients of abstract expressionism, the
absurdisms of the Dadaist movement and the political and social turmoil of
the 20th century. He gestured towards what Zygmunt Baumann called our
‘liquid modernity’ (2000). Marx, too, had that same premonitionary itch
when he penned the following:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the

instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and
with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes
of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condi-
tion of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolution-
izing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch
from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of
ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-
formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid
 ‘Who Am I?’ 25
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled
to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with
his kind.
(Marx, 2018)

One and a half centuries after Balzac we are ship-wrecked in a world in

which the solvents of the ‘constant revolution of production’, endless ‘dis-
turbance in all social relations’, ‘uncertainty, agitation’ combined with a
devastating sense of precarity and vulnerability in the face of global changes,
that we seem to have no control over, are pushing us towards a new identity
threshold. The Anthropocene has demolished our certainty in our separate-
ness from the Other. We cannot sustain the polite and ‘sober’ tolerances
of a hyper-individualistic society in the face of massive population shifts,
environmental stress and resource depletion. In the face of this pressure
from without, identity is in transition. The turmoil is twofold because we
also have pressure from within. There is a compulsion to be ever more: an
extended being trapped in a body, a state both devastating and perplexing!
Mozzini captures this sense beautifully noting:

When I was a kid, we would play a game called ‘wireless phone’ and
it worked just fine. Today, however, the desire of wanting to be more
than one’s body and to connect oneself on a global scale is modulated
by the massive use of screens on smart devices photosensitive to the
touch.
(2018, p. np)

The radical question of ‘Who am I?’ has now become evermore dense, con-
voluted and culturally, ecologically, historically, politically and economi-
cally loaded. Marx saw this at the anthropocentric level but, as Timothy
Morton points out, his anthropocentrism was a ‘bug’, not an intrinsic fea-
ture, of his analysis of human processes (Morton, 2017, p. 7ff).

Solidarity
For Morton, the key insight of Marx in relation to his analysis of aliena-
tion is the deployment of the concept of ‘solidarity’. Morton is arguing for
an ‘extended human’ via a Marx freed from his anthropocentrism – the
‘bug’ – and its implicit specist orientation. Such a move provides us with
a pathway to approach the identity threshold that we have been dancing
around for well over two centuries. Our struggle with the question ‘Who am
I?’ hinges on the separation of the world, what Morton calls the ‘symbiotic
real’ (2017, p. 18), because we privilege thought over experience. Solidarity,
for Morton, offers us a way to re-engage the world in its fullness by offering
us ‘a thought and a feeling’ that bridges the Western assertion that thought
and being are separate.
26 Marcus Bussey
For me, solidarity is an antidote to the problem Marx saw of all things
‘melting into air’ as it posits a ‘real’ that is not outside of us, but part of
us. Such an object-oriented ontological proposition, Morton argues, pushes
back on the ‘Severing’ of human consciousness from the world it inhabits.
As Morton explains:

Solidarity must mean human psychic, social and philosophical being

resisting the Severing. This is not as hard as it seems because the basic
symbiotic real requires no maintaining by human thought or psychic
activity … Solidarity, a thought and a feeling and a physical and politi-
cal state, seems in its pleasant confusion of feeling-with and being-with,
appearing and being, phenomena and thing, active and passive, not sim-
ply to gesture to this non-severed real, but indeed to emerge from it.
(2017, pp. 18–19)

This line of thought gets me thinking. Perhaps some of the difficulty around
identity in our current era is the ‘severed’ nature of our relationship with
the real. If we take an object-oriented ontological position, in which the real
is in fact a ‘symbiotic real’ in which we are embedded in ‘solidarity’, then
our need to anchor our hopes on a singular ‘objectified’ identity might be
allayed. Perhaps? Living with such a ‘perhaps’ might be uncomfortable but
if the alternative is a quest for a foundational identity, always with violence
as its default position, then the discomfort is worthwhile. ‘Perhaps’ suggests
indeterminacy, in which liminality, fuzziness, complexity and uncertainty
are fellow travellers.

A Surplus of Presence
Balzac’s story points to this. Porbus and Poussin represent the conventional
realists met with the ‘madness’ of Frenhofer, whose obsession with ‘perfec-
tion’ invites in the doubt of a ‘perhaps’ that calls to him and simultaneously
undermines his own hopes of completion, finality, fruition and transcend-
ence. Such hopes act as solvents, in which all that is solid melts and all
that is foundational proves elusive. The ‘severed’ that underpins a Western
ontology of objectivity and control breaks down. Frenhofer drowns in a
surplus of presence. And this is important, because the disintegration of his
identity is conditional on his quest for a new sublime in art and culture. His
capacity to represent the unrepresentable, that which exceeds the human
language of the visual and the sayable, in short, the apophatic (Sells, 1994),
forces him to occlude the visible La Belle Noiseuse – the beautiful trouble-
maker – with ‘confused masses of colour’. This effort gestures towards, in
the language of Jacques Rancière:

the internal impossibility of representation, the fact that a certain type

of object leaves representation in ruins by shattering any harmonious
 ‘Who Am I?’ 27
relationship between presence and absence, between the material and
the intelligible.
(2009, p. 111)

Such is the mimetic nature of people that a failure to represent, a rupture

in strong correlationism, which leads to identity malaise. Once again, the
threshold looms. Do we step across? Do we dare? If we look in the mirror
and see Chaosmos, can we find a new meaning? A new pattern? Clearly
Frenhofer did not, and he paid the price. Today, can we afford not to look
for a way across the identity threshold so that we can tell broader stories
of our possible futures beyond sectarian foundationalism, fascist violence
and strongman politics? I argue that we cannot. And this message is coming
from many quarters.
For instance, Ananta Kumar Giri, himself a bridge between Western and
Eastern epistemologies, offers us an ontology and epistemology of partici-
pation. This is not unlike the work of Morton in that Giri argues for an
ontological sociality drawing on a ‘solidarity … not entrapped in a logic of
nation-state and [anthropocentric] society’ (2018, p.43). Giri notes those
working with the legacy of Marx such as Immanuel Wallerstein are working
in such a territory. Morton inhabits this territory also. But Giri also turns
to Gandhi and Heidegger in developing his ideas. For him, being-with out-
weighs the necessity of the Western subject to objectify. Thus, he concludes:

Ontological cultivation also includes the challenge of cultivating non-

dual modes within ourselves as subjects of investigation. Such an onto-
logical cultivation has an epochal significance, as our theories and
methods have been imprisoned within the modernist privileging of epis-
temology over ontology.
(2018, p. 43)

New Ways of Being-With

Reflecting on this passage, it is tempting to assert that Frenhofer’s obsession
with his portrait bordered on non-duality. He understood that his research
as an artist required what Giri speaks to as a ‘time of communication and
silence’ offering a ‘“poetics of dwelling” rather than building’ (ibid.). From
such a perspective, the identity threshold facing current humanity is perhaps
a little less daunting. Solidarity, premised on either an object-oriented ontol-
ogy or an ontology of participation, lays the foundation for an expanded
sense of humanity. Morton’s ‘humankind’. Of course, this implies a new
experience of identity, one that challenges the essentialist notion of a unitary
self, allowing for and inviting in a less rigid more fluid and flexible construct
that promises freedom from an essential ‘I’. Currently, such an I, as Morton
(2017, p. 184ff) shows, is severed from the broader community of nonhu-
mans. What we are seeking, at the threshold of a new identity configuration
28 Marcus Bussey
is an embedded, extended self that sits in solidarity with nonhumans. New
identities of course presuppose new ways of being-with, alongside other
humans and nonhumans (humankind), and also, internally, subjectively
enacting a new kind of interiority, something spiritual, and aesthetic, as a
causal trigger for a new arrangement of solidarity, for new expressions of
our subjective relationship to an objective world that is not other but with.
Such a liminal, in-between space is messy. Sarkar’s (1993) Tantra with its
promotion of a Neohumanist vision speaks to this liminality, calling for a
‘subjective approach via objective adjustment’ in which agency is recon-
figured and individual development is linked to inter-subjective action. In
this arrangement of self-other, spiritual pragmatics emerge that supply the
energy to cross the threshold at which we stand (Bussey, 2014, 2017). The
narrative collapse that Han and others point to begins to find new directions
premised on a new sense of the possibilities of solidarity.
This is why Morton argues: ‘Philosophy requires a new theory of action,
a queer one that is neither active nor passive nor a compromised amalgam
of both’ (2017, p. 188). To enact solidarity requires a turning towards a liv-
ing, vibrant presence. It changes how we experience time. Solidarity doesn’t
deny the past nor assume a single future but allows for multiple pasts and
futures to comingle in multiple presents. So, yes, we need a new theory of
action to manage such a condition. We also need a new sensory language to
move beyond a discourse of brokenness. It is not that our question ‘Who am
I?’ is misguided, even broken. Rather we have been looking for the answer
with the wrong map: the Enlightenment rational subject map. Our map, a
‘perhaps’ map, is of a different kind.

The Witness
Claudia Eppert offers us the witness as an open subject, perhaps-map in
hand, who can find their way into this territory. For her:

the witness participates in a search for, engagement with, and commu-

nication of an inner and outer experience that is intimately linked with
larger struggles for fuller connection and with the question of how to
live (and die) in the world. Witnessing is thus bound up not only to eth-
ics and identity in a secular frame but also to ‘spirit,’ to the self’s search
to awaken consciousness to, for lack of a better expression, a relational
place in the universe.
(italics added, 2008, p. 59)

Witnessing is a powerful idea, and of course, it is not new with Levinas,

Butler and Clendinnen for example, all approaching it from various angles
(Butler, 2004; Clendinnen, 1998; Levinas, 1996). Yet how we witness, bear
witness and actively witness are significant. For Eppert, this witnessing is
embedded in material and spiritual flows that speak to an extended identity.
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The box of
whistles
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The box of whistles

An illustrated book on organ cases: with notes on organs at
home and abroad

Author: John Norbury

Release date: October 13, 2023 [eBook #71862]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Bradbury, Agnew & Co, 1877

Credits: deaurider, Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOX OF

WHISTLES ***
 Transcriber’s Note
Larger, higher-resolution versions of the pipe organs may
be seen by clicking (Larger) below them.
Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
The Box of Whistles.
 Cooper & Hodson Lith. 132 Red Lion Sq. W.C.
(Larger)
ST. PAULS CATHEDRAL LONDON.
OLD ORGAN.
 THE

ox of histles
AN ILLUSTRATED BOOK ON ORGAN CASES:

WITH

Notes on Organs at Home and Abroad.

BY

JOHN NORBURY.

LONDON:
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., 8, 9, 10, BOUVERIE STREET, E.C.
1877.
[All Rights reserved.]
 LONDON:
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS
 PREFACE.
N publishing this work, it is not my wish or intention to
attempt to teach the Player how to use, the Maker how to
build, or the Architect how to encase, the second
instrument mentioned in the Bible, but to put before the
descendants of Jubal that which may incite them to continue to
improve the noble instrument, which the combined efforts of taste,
science, and skill, have brought to its present degree of excellence.

JOHN NORBURY.
32, Gordon Square, London,
April, 1877.
 CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
PAGE
THE BOX OF WHISTLES 1

Introductory.

CHAPTER II.
THE ORGAN CASE 2
Division into Four Classes.—Subdivisions of ditto.

CHAPTER III.
WHAT A GOOD CASE SHOULD BE 4

Style not necessarily Gothic.—Renaissance Style.—Tin

Pipes now seldom used.—An Organ Case need not
correspond with the Style of Architecture of the Building.—
English Cases during the last Hundred Years.—An Organ
Case should be good.—Unequal Number of Towers.—
Ponts.—Oak and other Woods.—Culs-de-Lampe.—
Ornaments.—Arrangement of Pipes.—Arrangement of
Towers.
 CHAPTER IV.
THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE PIPES 7

Number of Pipes.—Not all of the Same Height.—Two

Tiers of Pipes.—Oval and Circular Openings.—Pipes
arranged in Perspective.—Carved Panels.—Inverted Pipes.
—Double Pipes.—Projecting Mouths.—Fancy Mouldings on
Pipes.—Pipes, gilt—diapered—painted—tin—bronzed.—
Tubes of Reed Stops projecting horizontally.—Tuba at York.

CHAPTER V.
THE CHOIR ORGAN AS A SEPARATE CASE 8

As a Screen to the Player.—Choir Front in the Lower Part

of Case.

CHAPTER VI.
THE MINOR DETAILS OF AN ORGAN 9

Room in the Loft.—Loft should not be used as a Singing

Gallery.—Reversed Key-boards.—Black Keys for Naturals,
&c.—Rows of Stops, perpendicular, horizontal.—Varied
Forms of Pedals.—Music Desk.—Lights.—Looking Glass.—
Clock.—Carving between the Pipes.—Fox-tail Stop.—
Electric and Pneumatic Actions.

NOTES ON ORGANS AT HOME AND

ABROAD.
NOTES ON ENGLISH ORGANS 10
NOTES ON FRENCH ORGANS 12

NOTES ON BELGIAN ORGANS 18

NOTES ON DUTCH ORGANS 22

NOTES ON GERMAN ORGANS 25

NOTES ON SWISS ORGANS 28

NOTES ON ITALIAN ORGANS 30

 ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGES
ST. PAUL’S, London. A fine Case by Grinling Gibbons, the
design is exceptional for one of Father Smith’s instruments
Frontispiece.

ST. LAWRENCE, Jewry, London. One of Harris’s

Organs, of nearly perfect design, according to the
old French rules. Since I sketched this Organ, it has
been rebuilt, and the Case much enlarged in the
same style 10–11

ST. MAGNUS THE MARTYR, London Bridge. A

good Case of peculiar design. This instrument is
remarkable as one of the earliest that had a Swell
Organ introduced 10–11

ST. SEPULCHRE’S, London. A fine Case in Harris’s

style 10–11

ST. WOLFRAM, Abbeville. A good specimen of a

French Renaissance Organ Case 12–17

ST. ETIENNE, Beauvais. A nice French-designed

Organ Case 12–17

THE CATHEDRAL, Rheims. A grand Organ Case in

the French style 12–17

THE CATHEDRAL, Rouen. A very large fine Organ 12–17

Case. The four similar flats in the Great Organ are a
blemish
ST. MACLOU, Rouen. A very pretty French Organ 12–17

ST. OUEN, Rouen. An elaborate Organ in the French

style 12–17

THE CATHEDRAL, Troyes. An excellent example of

a French Organ in a western gallery 12–17

THE CATHEDRAL, Antwerp. A fine elaborate Case 18–21

ST. PAUL’S, Antwerp. A fine Case, the carved work

of which is perhaps the best in Belgium 18–21

ST. BAVON, Ghent. A well designed and well carved

Case 18–21

OUDE KERK, Amsterdam. A fine Case, of a

thoroughly Dutch pattern 22–24

ST. JOHN’S, Gouda. A quaint Dutch Case 22–24

ST. BAVON, Haarlem. A very fine Case, the effect of

which is damaged by being painted 22–24

ST. JANS KERK, Hertogenbosch. Said to be one of

the finest Cases in Europe 22–24

ST. LAWRENCE, Rotterdam. A very fine Dutch

Case, in a sober style 22–24

THE CATHEDRAL, Freiburg-im-Bresgau. A good

example of a hanging Organ 25–27
INDEX TO NOTES ON ORGANS.

Abbeville—
St. Sepulchre’s, 12;
St. Wolfram, 12.
Amiens—
The Cathedral, 12;
St. ——, 12.
Amsterdam—
Nieuwe Kerk, 22;
Oude Kerk, 22.
Antwerp—
The Cathedral, 18;
English Church, 18;
St. George, 19;
St. Jacques, 19;
St. Paul (Dominicans), 19.

Bayeux—
The Cathedral, 12.
Beauvais—
The Cathedral, 13;
St. Etienne, 13.
Bellaggio—
Private Chapel of Villa Melzi, 30.
Berne—
The Cathedral, 28.
Bois-le-Duc—See Hertogenbosch.
Boulogne—
The Cathedral, 13.
 The Cathedral, 13.

Bruges—
The Cathedral, 19;
St. Anne, 20;
St. Jacques, 20;
St. Jean (Hospital), 20;
Notre Dame, 20;
Convent des Sœurs de Charité, 20.
Brussels—
Ste. Gudule, 20;
Notre Dame des Victoires, 20.

Caen—
St. Etienne, 13;
St. Jean, 13;
St. Pierre, 13;
St. Trinité, 13.
Chester—
The Cathedral, 11.
Chiavenna—
San Lorenzo, 30.
Coblentz—
St. Castor, 25.
Coire—
The Dom (St. Lucius), 28.
Cologne—
The Cathedral, 25;
Minorites, 25.
Como—
The Cathedral, 30.
Coutances—
The Cathedral, 14;
St. Nicolas, 14;
St. Pierre, 14.

Delft—
Nieuwe Kerk 22;