Identity Fetishism (the objectification of echoism)
In over-identifying with the generalized other, the echoist sacrifices at first self-interest, as does the traditional altruist, but also thence the very self, if the pursuit of the other’s needs and desires overcomes the one who so pursues. The echoist is commonly seen as the figure who expresses personality traits opposite to that of the narcissist, though it is not correct to assume that this latter always acts in their own best interest. The narcissist is, after all, blinded by his own blind loyalty not to the self as he actually is, but to an idealized selfhood into which he has placed a fallible reality. The echoist, on her part, denies that the self either has needs at all, or, more usually, places these needs below those claimed by the other, giving them a lesser value. The danger for psychology as a discourse when using these Greek ethical constructions is that, aside from their original caveat against extremities – the golden mean or moderation in all things was a Greek mantra – that the best kind of personality holds within it a balance of self and other, which is a mere technical manner of stating that a neo-Christian selfhood is the newer ideal. Not the Christian in the original, and more radical sense, for the neighbor figure is after all the ultimate altruist. He is, as I have stated elsewhere, simply the libertine of compassion.
Not so the ‘balanced’ self, which identifies with the generalized other as if this abstract and very much collective presence is expressed in now this individual before me, now that. Such a middle road, the fairway between La Scylla of the echoist and the Charybdis of the narcissist, and thus the fair way to adjudicate between one’s own needs and those of the other or others, always as well denies the selfhood as it is. It is a personalized way of doing the same to the world as it is. For in gifting oneself to the other, we do generally gain our own desires, be they having to do with public acclaim, a sense of personal vindication, a veneer of the virtuous, or being a model citizen, in no order and perhaps also in toto. Augustine is himself cautious about self-sacrifice, not due to Jesus becoming the Christ through so enacting it, but rather because for lesser beings, it would be a challenge to sort out one’s intents. Are we truly selfless in our actions? Did we actually put the other before ourselves? Do we rather seek to become an echo of the savior; to ‘borrow status’, to use a sociological turn of phrase.
The narcissist seeks all such things, and in spades. In this, he is by far the easier to identify, and perhaps somewhat perversely, to identity with as well. He is unsure of his own person and thus desires to build around it a persona, the bastion against self-doubt constructed of that same anxious architecture. A persona is, however, still a more authentic expression of the lack of selfhood than is the fullest leap into the generalized other. A persona, though a mask, yet must be carried by its wearer. Not so otherness, of course, for it is irruptive, if rare, and especially in modernity. Not so the Other, capital ‘O’, which is alien and we would suggest, generally incomprehensible even if fully present to our senses bemused. But the case is different when it comes to echoism. This otherness, generalized in G.H. Mead’s sense that one has by a certain age internalized social norms and is able to exemplify them in one’s day to day or quotidian conduct – something which the over-identification with specific guises of the generalized other ironically allows one as a person, and even as a citizen, to forego – is not taken on as one does a costume of oneself, as in narcissism, but is rather slipped bodily into as if one were able to simply up and transfer one’s being into a ready-made vessel. Anyone who has adopted for themselves a form of identity politics has indulged in this fantasy.
This is why one might suggest that there has been an objectification of echoism. The classic echoist, whom one might recognize casually as a ‘doormat’ or even a masochist, gears herself into the needs of singular others, usually serially and repetitively. It is these persons who are at most risk for domestic abuse, for example. The echoist internalizes the sense that she is of little value, or that her only value is in being a servant of another, aggrandizing his needs if he has no merit, or, if authentic value is present, then aiding his genuine quest. Either way, the echoist denies the self. It is a pressing weakness of the genius that he demands an echo; first from a person, then a community, and thence from the world itself. When Mahler consulted Freud in the Netherlands in 1910, the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams had recently appeared and its author was by then as world-famous as was the celebrity composer and conductor. Aside from uttering the expected ‘what a meeting of giants, wish I could have been there’, we can more seriously remind ourselves that no archaeologies of selfhood, no high-flying hermeneutics, no ambitious analyses were involved. No, Freud simply told Mahler that he was being a prick, hmm. For Mahler’s marriage had been shipwrecked by his demand that Alma, once the hottest young woman in Vienna and an aspiring composer in her own right, should utterly sacrifice her own needs and desires to his superior gifts. And as challenging as it would be to compete with a Mahler, this was manifestly not what Alma was trying in any case to do. Freud told Mahler to instead aid his estranged wife’s quest, and ‘who better to do it’, for Pete’s sakes. More deeply and consistently, to take his mate’s needs as seriously as he took his own. Note to self, and dear reader.
Alma was neither echoist nor narcissist. But then again, neither was her husband. So, what comes out of this historical vignette is both an illustration of the problem of identifying just exactly where our selfhood lies, especially in relation to others, and also, by extension, where might we find the place or the space wherein our best self resides? For many today, these questions are too challenging to confront in any authentic manner. Hence the mass objectification of echoism as a parallax to the much more individuated construction of a persona. Statements such as ‘I am a person of color, a trans-person, a proud boy, a Christian “first”, a liberal, a conservative, a survivor of the residential schools, a Holocaust survivor, an abuse victim, a revolutionary, a woman, a man’ and a myriad of others, if held to be front and center in even casual conversation and in one’s political opinions, if taken to be the defining characteristic of one’s selfhood, are all decoys, meant to help one avoid the anguish of being a self, and short-circuiting the essential relation between anxiety and personhood. With all the patent irony of modernism, it is psychotherapy itself which plays upon these projections. And even if we place our faith in the analytic process – which involves a gradual unmasking of persona in order to confront the authentic self in all of its patently fragile mortality – we must, in the end, also abandon the wider conception of faith as well.
But what of the second term in our title? Speaking of faith, the fetish item, ethnographically, contained the Mana of some otherwise amorphous and animistic force. It might be the famed Churinga stones of the Australians, it might be the disembodied artifacts pinned into the shaman’s mesa in Mexico, or yet the ‘figurines of the Virgin Mary’, to borrow from King Crimson. Marx lights upon this conception and realizes that in capital, it is the commodity which now is seen as ‘Mannic’, excuse the obvious pun. Part of the object’s ‘surplus’, indirectly linked to the broader economic conception of surplus value, lies in its ability to transfer the consumer’s desire by objectifying it. The ‘finest’ marques, such as Ferrari, have mastered not the marketing of self-indulgence, but rather the ability to place the person in intimate association with the thing, as if the driver of a legendary auto is direct kindred with the shaman and their traditional fetish. Certainly, when I drove an expensive Jaguar just for fun, I felt a kind of augmented power, as if the prosthetic was mimicking an extramundane quality, something that the shaman’s tried and true trickery also mimicked. I also felt that the big cat was a mere extension of myself, and not just of my body, but rather of my very being.
And this is what the idolaters of identity also seek. In their absence of selfhood, they desire to deny their very existence as human beings first, as historical beings, as beings endowed, by evolution or otherwise, with both reason and imagination, and as cleaving to a very much mutable ‘human nature’ which is not, and has never been, one thing, let alone the one thing they have, like a long line of crucified simulacra, hung themselves upon.
G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, social theory, aesthetics and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.