Identity in a Box, or, The Modern Listmania

Lists are addictive. From the standby Top 10 to the various assortments of things cobbled together and associated on the Huffington Post, I’ve always found that lists seem to fulfill some deep-seated void for analysis and order in our postmodern mélange. Which is why I found this interview with Justice Stephen Breyer (of the United States Supreme Court) at The Browser so interesting. In short, it’s a list of the five books that have had, in his estimation, the biggest influence on his judicial thought. It’s an intriguingly diverse list: ranging from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to Austin’s fun little How to Do Things with Words all the way to A la recherche du temps perdu. Breyer actually does a very good job explaining his relationship with each of the books and giving them sense in concert with the others.

Yet even without the analysis, the list of 5 books would give us, the readers, something curious to think about. In our heads, we can perform the same type of analysis that Breyer performed upon himself, with the added unit of operating within the paradigm of the Foucauldian author-function. We work from both ends, trying to find the pathway between Breyer’s jurisprudence and Proust, not unlike the quest to link everyone in the world to Kevin Bacon or the President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site to Peter Gabriel’s 1977 self-titled album but with (very) slightly more intellectual value. Drawing links and finding connections creates a way to generate more thought and more discourse all while satisfying an urge for order in the universe and eating up free time that might otherwise be spent bored.

There is a fascinating question that comes along with asking about books, movies, writers, or philosophers in terms of intellectual influence or most meaningful impact, as the Breyer interview does. It provides a substitute for asking someone to explain her personal philosophy or what she believes, instead allowing those beliefs to channel through external sources and reference points. It raises the issue of the relationship between identity and identification – to what extent is the Self internal (an “identity”), how does that identity interact with objects in the world (“identification”), and does it make more sense to say that identification is an expression of the identity or that identity is constitutive of the objects of identification? It’s a harder question than it seems, because we as readers are never given access to the underlying identity for our inspection and requisite analytical pokes and prods. Instead, we’re given Breyer’s list of books, his own legal opinions and writings, and the explanation that he offers here and told to connect the two.

The association between names and ideas gives us a way to shortcut when explaining complicated ideas and to place things in their historical contexts. Perhaps it’s an oversimplification to say that people are entirely comprehensible as products of their influences, but it’s certainly not a reach to say that people are the products of their influences and unique moments. I think Derrida makes a good point of this in “Signature, Event, Context” when he talks about the relationship between performatives and constatives in language, coincidentally enough, in response to Austin’s book:

Could a performative statement succeed if its formulation did not repeat a "coded" or iterable statement, in other words if the expressions I use to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming to an iterable model, and therefore if they were not identifiable in a way as a "citation"? (326)

I think Derrida is right in assigning the force of performatives to the authority of similar performatives that came before. There is a mingling of personal agency and authority (eg only religious figures, justices of the peace, and ship’s captains can marry people and no one but the President of the United States can give force to an Executive Order) with an external authority centered in tradition and precedent, in much the same way that words do have to have some sort of cited referentiality to be comprehensible. This principle extends to the “list of books that have influenced you” question. One can identify with five books, three philosophers, or a few movies; pick a greatest contribution of some civilization or other; or explain a movement and why she finds herself on it, and in those discussions, a picture a personal philosophy and an intellectual identity arise. These exercises have value beyond diversions and time-killers, because they give us a way to talk about the things we believe in the way they actually grew in the first place.