Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

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‘care of the self’, is quite inescapable as a point of reference here (Foucault 1988, 

2003). 

These fields now cover every aspect of human life, and for every aspect we see 

the appearance of micro-hegemonic norms and standards: the body, food, art, 

work, mobility, dress, the mind, education, name it. Figure 2 provides a self-

evident illustration of this: the way in which a female body is defined in terms of 

an ideal (or at least ‘better’) ‘goal weight’. Figure 3 instantly connects this 

standard of a slim, fit and healthy female body to consumption – healthy food 

habits. In this illustration we see how aspects of human life – aspects which 

many people would understand as belonging to the private sphere – are 

intertwined with consumption behavior. 

 

 

Figure 2: goal weight 

 

Figure 3: healthy eating 

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Barthes, in another influential book, sketched the difference between ‘clothes’ 

and ‘fashion’ as grounded not in objective features of the objects themselves, but 

in their subjective ‘adjectives’, so to speak, in the mythological attributes that 

particular clothes acquired through elaborate discourses on quality, style and 

class distinction; such discourses were developed and circulated in the ‘fashion’ 

magazines, and they determined the commodity price of the garments (Barthes 

1983). We now see that ‘fashion’, defined in those terms, has extended into an 

immense terrain of social and cultural life and that, in each of these now 

fashionable domains, we witness the emergence and consolidation of complexes 

of instruction and prescription, management and monitoring, identity effects – 

and all of this deeply interwoven with commodification. Healthy food can be 

purchased and demands investments in terms of ‘choice’; physical beauty and 

fitness can also be purchased, and while all of this used to be a rather ‘organic’ 

matter closely tied to one’s general lifestyle – fitness and physical prowess for 

instance being associated with hard physical labor, as in Zola’s Bête Humaine – 

all of these things have now become segmented and detached items subject to a 

normative regime and driven by consumption patterns. We have moved from 

one lifestyle to an infinite range of lifestyles, all of which are now objects of 

discursive and semiotic elaboration and all of which can now be seen as 

elementary aspects of the self.

6

  

We thus witness an ordered and subjected self remarkably at odds with the 

ideologies of freedom that surround it, a self that needs to establish and maintain 

order over a distributed complex of micro-selves, each of which can define how 

others perceive, understand and evaluate us.

 7

 For each new segment of social 

and cultural life that becomes detached and organized as a space of discipline 

and order, becomes in the same move a space of social evaluation, something 

about which others can pass hard and uncompromising judgments. Such 

judgments are fundamentally rooted in recognizability: I recognize this or that 

aspect of behaviour as being indexical of, say, elegance, intelligence and 

sophistication, or of poor taste, weakness of character or judgment, boorishness 

or ‘wannabe’-ship. And I can recognize this because – pace Bourdieu – I share the 

codes and conventions of this field with others. In semiotic terms, I recognize 

things because of the relative degree of uniformity they dispay in relation to a 

particular (usually ideal, i.e. imagined) standard. Thus, recognizability is a key 

feature of how we organize the many aspects of social and cultural life; we will 

strive towards maximum recognizability in most of what we do and our worst 

                                                        

6

 

See Blommaert (2010: 47ff) for an illustration of ‘American accent’ being sold over the 

internet. It is an example of the infinite detailing of commodification we observe here. 

7

 Thus, every technological innovation creates in essence a free  and unscripted space, 

but becomes in practice a space filled in no time by prescriptions and norms. The social 

media are case in point. While they are ideologically often seen as a space for individual 

exploration and articulation, an avalanche of books on ‘how to be a star on Facebook’ 

have appeared, replete with detailed descriptions of how much to write, how often, and 

to whom. See e.g. Deckers & Lacy (2010) for an example of the micro-practices entailed 

in ‘self-branding’ online.  

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anxieties are often about not being recognized as that which we aspire to be. 

Recognizability also has to do with degrees of doing: in our endeavours to be 

someone or something, we can be judged as complete failures (e.g. as ‘trashy’ 

when trying to be ‘classy’) or failures to a degree (hence ‘wannabes’ – people 

who almost get the micro-management right, but not quite so) – also depending 

on the context of evaluation, and the evaluator.  

Consider Figure 4, and observe especially the almost instant recognizability of 

the complex of semiotic features we can label – i.e. recognize – as ‘business 

culture’, ‘managerial style’, inscribed in dress, make-up, mood (smiling faces, i.e. 

optimism and congeniality), the organization of bodies in space, and the 

orientation towards objects such as laptops and documents. 

 

Figure 4: Management team 

Recognizability is about getting all the details right, about composing a jigsaw of 

features that are in line with the normative expactations that generate 

reconizability. Such arrangements are intricate and put pressure on the 

resources people have at their disposal; they are compelling, and not only in 

dominant sociocultural strata, as we can see from Figure 5: make-up guidelines 

for a Gothic woman. Here we can see how even ‘deviant’, i.e. subcultural 

identities operate on the basis of compelling guidelines and instructions. 

Subcultures are as normative as mainstream ones, and deviating from norms 

always amounts to trading one set of norms for another. Rejections of cultural 

scripts involve complex and demanding scripts themselves, often in response to 

the ‘Why?’ question that employing certain cultural scripts and consequently 

ignoring others elicit from our fellow human beings (hence, e.g. ‘Why are you not 

on Facebook?’). And increasing social and cultural superdiversity provokes an 

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