Inside and outside of identity in the cultural experience of pandemic and war

Abstract

Despite the widespread understanding of identity as “the meaning of oneself” (S. Huntington), it remains an opaque concept that firmly holds a double identity — a simultaneous reference to uniqueness in the subject (identity to oneself), singularity and to sameness (identity as an analogy to a norm, type, class, collective pattern). This key paradox, the contextual dependence of this concept, is cultivated not only within scientific discourse, but also in the habitual gesture of public rhetoric, which tirelessly “calls things by their proper names”. Based on modern ideas about the production of identities through the "politics of resentment" (F. Fukuyama), "politics of the street" (J. Butler) or "politics of vulnerability" (L. Chouliaraki), the article examines the transformation of cultural identities in Ukrainian society in recent years. The fragmentation and multimodality of identities in the state of the coronavirus pandemic is due to the testing of new formats of global and local interactions against the backdrop of changes in information regimes, forced closure of national territories and actively implemented biopolitics. The event of Russia’s military invasion divided the space and time of existence into "we" and "they", overcoming the uncertainty and multiplicity of previous reactions of individual and collective subjects, turned participation in society, the fact of citizenship into an existential experience of people, formed the Ukrainian project as a model of identity, with a clearer than before value credo of "freedom, dignity, security." The near future will show how the mastered practices for producing identities will be sustainable and effective in the conditions of the “new normality”, what are the risks of their modifications.