Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

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on the same issue from a right-wing nationalist organization, a cultural heritage 

foundation or a radio DJ specializing in Reggae. ‘Essential’ Britishness will each 

time appear in an entirely different shape. One can already anticipate the many 

ways in which such differences can become fields of sharp conflict and 

contestation, and we will return to this below. 

3. The different degrees of fluency in enregistering these discursive orientations 

are crucial as another field of contest and conflict. When criteria are being set 

(i.e. particular configurations of emblematic features are assembled), some 

people will inevitably have easier access to these features than others, and will 

consequently have less problems in discoursing about them (and ‘in’ them, by 

embodying them or by displaying them as part of their ‘habitus’). We emphasize 

the processual and dynamic nature of this: we use ‘enregistering’ rather than 

‘register’, because as we have seen, the specific configuration of features is 

always changeable and never stable, and people are confronted with the task of 

perpetual re-enregistering rather than just acquiring and learning, once and for 

all, the register. Competence (to use an old term) is competence in changing the 

parameters of identity categories, and in adjusting to such changes. 

4. Conflict and contest are evident in such a shifting and dynamic process, where, 

furthermore, the stakes are sometimes quite high. Being qualified by others as a 

‘wannabe’, a ‘fake’ or some other dismissive category is one of many people’s 

greatest anxieties. For people charged with crimes, or asylum seekers hoping to 

acquire the refugee status, such categorizations can be a matter of life and death. 

5. A special note about ‘enoughness’ is in order. The benchmark for being 

admitted into an identity category (as a ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ member) is ‘having 

enough’ of the features specified for them. This is slippery terrain, because 

‘enough’ is manifestly a judgment, often a compromise, and rarely a black-and-

white and well-defined set of criteria (this even counts for apparently clear and 

unambiguous administrative criteria, see Mehan 1996 for an excellent example 

of a ‘learning disabled’ child; Blommaert 2009 for a judgment call of sorts in 

asylum procedures). Competence, to return to what we said above, often 

revolves around the capacity to make adequate judgment calls on enoughness. 

Enoughness also explains some of the strange and apparently incoherent 

phenomena observed in contexts where authenticity is the core of the issue, as in 

minority cultural groups. We observe in such contexts that the use and display of 

‘homeopathic’ doses of e.g. the heritage language can suffice as acts of authentic 

identity. Greetings and other concise communicative rituals, indigenous songs or 

dances can prevail over the absence of most of ‘indigenous’ culture as features 

that produce enough authenticity (e.g. Moore 2011 for an excellent example; also 

Silverstein 2006). In contexts of rapid sociocultural change (as e.g. in the case of 

migration) and the dispersal of contexts for identity work (as in the increased 

use of social media), we can expect enoughness to gain more and more 

importance as a critical tool for identity work. One needs to be ‘enough’ of a 

rapper, not ‘too much’; the same goes for an art lover, an intellectual, a football 

fan, an online game player and so forth. 

 

 

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Enoughness in action 1: The chav 

The range of features that can be employed in identity work in order to produce 

authenticity can be wide and include a number of different, and sometimes very 

elaborate semiotic means. However, in actual practice the features that produce 

recognisable identities can be reduced to a very limited set, and here we 

encounter something that can be called ‘dosing’. That is, mobilising an authentic 

identity discourse about oneself can be a matter of attending to the most 

infinitesimally small details – sometimes even only observable to those ‘in the 

know’ – and a very small number of recognisable items, such as a piece of 

clothing. 

2

 

In enregistering such features, certain rules need to be observed for the process 

to be successful – to be recognised by others as what was intended. These are the 

rules that ‘newcomers’, ‘beginners’ and ‘wannabes’ need to observe and mobilise 

in their own identity work in order to ‘pass’ as authentic to someone (cf. e.g. 

Kennedy’s 2001 account on racial passing). This is where the Internet, for all the 

freedom and opportunity it is seen as offering for creative identity-play, appears 

not only as a useful instructional, normative source for the ‘wannabe’ but also as 

a space rife with regulatory discourses on ‘how to’ be or become someone. 

YouTube, for instance, features plenty of ‘how to’ videos – videos providing 

viewers with instructions on the minute details of how to be an ‘authentic’ 

gangsta or emo – that is, the features that should be employed for an authentic 

identity as a gangsta or an emo to be produced. The Internet now offers an 

infinite range of identity assembly kits and complements them with volumes of 

users’ guides. Such identities are not necessarily offered to replace others; they 

are offered as additional niches, and one can walk in and out of them ad lib. The 

users’ guides, therefore, are the micro-hegemonies we mentioned above.  

The chav culture – a form of working-class British youth culture – is one example 

of a subculture very visible on the Internet. A search online for anything ‘chav’ 

provides plenty of material for someone wishing to ‘chavify’ oneself (although it 

should be perhaps pointed out that this is not amongst the most desired and 

aspired to identities to be displayed by young Brits) – from YouTube videos to 

images that put forvard a ‘chav-semiotics’ where certain features are iconic of a 

chav identity.  

                                                        

2

 We can see ‘dosing’ also in the many studies of ‘styling’ now available in the literature since 

Rampton’s (1995) pioneering work. Homeopathic doses of features – one sound sometimes, or 

one word – can be enough to redefine the speakers in an interaction as well as the whole 

situation itself. 

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