Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

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The gentlemen in the picture are both cleanly shaven, attractive, and wear a dark 

suit and necktie; the ladies are young, attractive, dressed in white shirts and 

(with one exception) dark jackets and have their hair either loose or tied into a 

knot. They drink water or soft drinks; all of them carry writing equipment. We do 

not see piercings or visible tattoos, no unshaven male chins, no uncombed hair, 

no silly coffee mugs. What we see here is the recognizability of a collection, or 

collocation of features, that makes a reading of ‘managers’ more plausible than, 

say, ‘a group of philosophers discussing Schopenhauer’.  The microhegemonies 

attached to specific objects and features can also be grouped into genres, and 

knowledgeability of individual indexicals needs to be accompanied by 

knowledgeability of such bundles of features. 

This is where the notion of ‘life projects’ enters the picture. Our everyday lives, 

thus observed, become complex projects in which almost every aspect, from the 

very big to the very small, requires elaborate forms of accounting and 

explanation to others, and requires elaborate ‘ordering’ work in attempts to “be 

ourselves” – more precisely, in attempts to be recognized  as the specific person I 

try to offer for ratification by others. “Project” here retains its intrinsic semantic 

ambivalence: we turn our existence into a project that demands perpetual work, 

elaboration, adjustment, change, transformation; and we do that by means of 

indexical ‘projections’ in which possession and display of a feature – my shoes, 

my car – triggers recognizable identity features. I arrive in my BMW at work, 

which makes me a “BMW guy”. I take my iPad from the car, which makes me an 

“Apple guy”. I walk in wearing my Boss suit, which makes me a “Boss guy”, and 

the receptionist is exposed to my Davidoff after-shave fragrance, which makes 

me a “Davidoff guy”, and so forth. At any moment of our everyday existence, thus, 

we are readable patchworks of recognizable micro-signs, each of which can be 

picked up by others and converted into identity projections. 

Life projects are highly dynamic and subject to substantial, and rapid, change. 

The readable patchwork we were at the age of 17 differs tremendously from the 

one we became at the age of 30. Changes in fashion, general preference, or 

technological standards trigger vast and pervasive changes in the way we 

consume and, thus, can or have to “be ourselves”. We repeat that “being 

ourselves” – widely believed to be something that we construct autonomously, 

with almost unlimited agentivity – is very much a matter of uptake and 

ratification by others. We can only “be ourselves” if and when others recognize 

and understand us as such. And evidently, this process is not restricted to what 

we would identify as the mainstream of society; it is as pervasive and as 

compelling in subcultures and in what Howard Becker (1963) a long time ago 

described as communities of “outsiders”. 

Light communities 

The groups that emerge out of the complex patterns of life projects described 

above are best seen as focused but diverse occasioned coagulations of people. 

People converge or coagulate around a shared focus – an object, a shared 

interest, another person, an event. This focusing is occasioned in the sense that it 

is triggered by a specific prompt, bound in time and space (even in ‘virtual’ 

space), and thus not necessarily ‘eternal’ in nature. This is why such forms of 

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coagulation should not be seen as creating uniformity or homogeneity: the 

people thus coagulating around a shared focus remain as diverse as before and 

after, in the sense that their identities remain as complex and multi-readable as 

before and after. Such coagulations, recall, were dismissed by Goffman as not 

being true “social groups” (Goffman 1961: 8-13), because Goffman restricted the 

notion of “social group” to formations that bore the traditional characteristics of 

“thick” communities in the Durkheimian tradition. 

But let us examine the matter in some detail. Take a group of people watching a 

football game in a pub. In all likelihood, while some of these people may know 

each other we cannot assume any degree of ‘deep’ affinity among those people. 

They converge on a shared focus, the game, which is a specific and unique 

occasion, but is also part of a genre of such occasions – football games broadcast 

in a pub. We see an amazingly robust group. During the game, these people will 

share an enormous degree of similarity in behavior, will experience a sense of 

almost intimate closeness and a vast amount of cognitive and emotional 

sharedness. A goal will provoke mass cheering, a missed chance provokes 

general distress and shouts of disappointment. Since they are in a pub, most if 

not all of them will consume drinks – while few, if any of them will order a meal 

during the game. And as soon as the game is over, the robust group will dissipate 

in no time. Several smaller groups will form, people will leave, and the patterns 

of behavior and interaction dominantly displayed during the game will vanish 

and be replaced by entirely different ones. The diversity that characterized the 

group, even while displaying tremendous uniformity during the event – re-

emerges as soon as the moment of focusing is over. We see here what Goffman 

observed as “an extremely full array of interaction processes” (1961: 11); but 

contrary to what Goffman suggested with respect to e.g. poker players, the 

participants in such focused practices do display, enact and embody a strong 

sense of group membership – one not replacing their traditional “thick” identities 

such as nationality, gender, social class, ethnicity and so forth, but a sense of 

group membership that might complement or, in some circumstances, even 

accentuate and intensify the “thick” community identities (as when one’s national 

team is at work). Such identities are part of identity repertoires and can be 

invoked in complex interactions with other elements from the repertoire, in 

which the specific “package” would be the identity presented to others for 

appraisal.  

So let us not too quickly dismiss such groups as unimportant. We spend very 

important parts of our lives in such ephemeral forms of groupness. When our 

morning train is late again, we find ourselves in conversations with other 

strangers on the platform, voicing amazingly similar complaints; the moment the 

train pulls in, these interactions cease and we return to habituated patterns of 

behavior – minding one’s own business on a train. A traffic accident or another 

calamity likewise provokes coagulations of highly diverse people into 

tremendously uniform groups. And while the ‘managers’ in Figure 4 appear like a 

very solid group in this picture of a “meeting”, nothing will prevent the 

participants from drifting off into entirely different directions as soon as the 

meeting finishes. The common features that enabled the closeness of groupness 

during the moment of focusing do not neutralize the many other, diverse 

features that each participant displays and can enact, and as soon as the joint 

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