What's the Trouble with Identity? Practices and Theories from France

Abstract

To theorize the ‘becoming child’ this article presents desire rather than identity, following Deleuze and Guattari. For desire to proliferate differently, everything that social, religious and moral identities try to control and police, following Foucault, must be deconstructed, reconceptualized and enabled. To show how this is possible the article exemplifies contemporary and historical practices from France, using the author's 30 years of experience as a researcher and a transdisciplinary sociologist there. The article thus transcends languages and normalized genres of English-language academic writing. In doing so it provides new directions for identity theory, from European genealogies and from a history of French early childhood from birth to age three. Arguing that identity is a keystone in modern capitalist society and that individualized processes come from micro-processes of subjugation, the article describes how institutions are organized not to operate or function but to assign status, identities and functions. Hence when you are a child in a preschool your identity must conform to what is demanded, and be limited to that of a preschooler or day-care child. Nevertheless, uncontrollable and unconscious desires operate. To make such theorizations, the article builds from sociology, anthropology, history and psychology. The author contends that Deleuze and Guattari's use of desire is akin to agency, and that those adults still close to childhood keep this alive.