Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

48 

see Blommaert & Varis (2012) – it surely helps Hijabistas to maneuver the field 

of conflict and contestation in which their practices are set. As noted earlier, the 

hijab is the object of heated debates, and while the Hijabistas clearly violate the 

demarcation of ‘hijab versus not hijab’ imposed from within certain branches of 

Islam, they also clearly violate public perceptions of Western modernity and 

male-female equality. 

 

References 

Blommaert, Jan & Piia Varis 2011. Enough is enough: The heuristics of 

authenticity in superdiversity. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies Paper 2.  

http://www.tilburguniversity.edu/research/institutes-and-research-

groups/babylon/tpcs/

 

Blommaert, Jan & Piia Varis 2012. Culture as accent. Tilburg Papers in Culture 

Studies, Paper 18. 

http://www.tilburguniversity.edu/research/institutes-and-

research-groups/babylon/tpcs/

  

Brenner, Suzanne 1996. Reconstructing self and society: Javanese Muslim 

women and “the veil”. American Ethnologist 23 (4), 673-697. 

Entwistle, Joanne 2000. The fashioned body. Fashion, dress and modern social 

theory. Cambridge: Polity. 

Fadil, Nadia 2011. Not - / unveiling as an ethical practice. Feminist Review 98, 83-

109. 

Foucault 1988. 

Hall, Stuart 1986. On postmodernism and articulation: An interview with Stuart 

Hall. Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, 45-60. 

Jones, Carla 2007. Fashion and faith in urban Indonesia. Fashion Theory 11 (2-3), 

211-232. 

Rimke, Heidi Marie 2000. Governing citizens through self-help literature. 

Cultural Studies 14 (1), 61-78. 

Rose, Nikolas 1999 (1989). Governing the soul. The shaping of the private self. 2

nd

 

edition. London: Free Association Books. 

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49 

Chapter 4: 

Life Projects and light communities 

 

In line with the discussions in the previous chapters, , we will attempt to sketch 

in what follows a realistic and empirically sustainable research program, 

focusing on the actual patterns of behavior that people display as bases, or 

indexicals, for defining identities, avoiding a priori categorizations and rejecting 

the exclusivity of explicitly identitarian metadiscourses as a research object in 

the study of identities. What people explicitly tell about identity is too often a 

very poor indicator of, and stands in an awkward relationship with, their actual 

identity articulating practices. Instead, we shall focus on observable behavior in 

connection to what we can call a micropolitics of identity – the presence and 

function of ‘ordering scripts’ in which various micro-practical features are 

brought into line with each other, and together, as an orderly ‘package’, create 

recognizable meanings.  

In what follows, we will describe such practices and the orderly way in which 

they occur as “life projects”. Adding to this, we will then suggest to view the 

specific kinds of ‘groupness’ that emerge from such practices as “focused but 

diverse”. Both notions will be introduced here in their most sketchy forms and 

without much reference to existing literature – the attempt here is to incite 

discussion and hypothesis testing through research, and even blunt and 

unfinished notional or analytic tools can be helpful in this process. 

Life Projects 

In earlier chapters, we emphasized (a) that contemporary identity work revolves 

strongly around consumption, as predicted half a century ago by Marcuse (1964); 

(b) that identity work, oriented towards ‘authenticity’, appears to involved 

complex ‘dosings’ of emblematic features; (c) within a rather narrow bandwidth 

of difference. Marcuse argued that identities are dislodged from the ‘grand 

politics’ of submission to or revolt against the political and economic system. 

Identities defined by orientations to specific commodities are thus depoliticized 

identities, identities that refer only to themselves and not to larger power 

structures.  

Our earlier chapters responded, we think, to this line of argument in three ways: 

(a) the ‘grand politics’ has not truly left the orbit of identity, but has been 

replaced by a micropolitics of “care of the self” that connects it in different ways 

to larger-scale political relations and social structures (Foucault 2007); and (b) 

this means that rather than depoliticization, we observe intense forms of 

repoliticization, oriented towards multiple, often ephemeral and temporary, but 

nonetheless compelling patterns of order, now dispersed over a vast terrain of 

everyday behaviors; (c) leading to limited forms of agency within a general 

structure of submission, perhaps aptly captured by the notion of “prosumer”: 

while submitting to the orders of consumption, people do produce something 

new, specific and unique – “culture as accent”. These three points are the takeoff 

position for what follows. 

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50 

Let us consider two ordinary examples of contemporary advertisement, both 

referring to automobiles. Figure 1, a Mercedes Benz ad, projects the purchase of 

a car onto “a belief”. Note that in the ad, the car itself is not visible: we just see 

the iconic sign of the brand; what dominates the ad is the statement that buying 

a Mercedes Benz – any Mercedes Benz – is more than the purchase of a useful 

object: it is the purchase of a mythologized object (in the sense of Barthes 1957), 

an overdetermined object that bespeaks a vision, a set of ideals, a particular 

attitude in life. Purchasing a Mercedes Benz means buying an identity, and when 

you drive this vehicle, you express that identity (or so it is suggested). 

BMW takes another route in Figure 2. Here, the object – the car – is connected to 

the role of a father and his relationship with his children. The connection with 

(gendered!) identity is explicit here: “How do you become ‘best daddy in the 

world’?” The answer: by buying a BMW. You will “impress his friends” and make 

your child so happy. 

 

 

Figure 1: Mercedes Benz advertisement 

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