Where You're At Is Where You've Been

Place-identity was a brought up in the previous post and I'd like to expand on it here. As with identity in any context, it is a 'heterogeneous assemblage' of layers and flows. That is to say, the external 'one' that others see has multiple internal and subconscious influences and interactions going on. From cradle to grave, it is a process of change. In terms of the social-psychology of 'place,' it is often thought of, along with place-dependence, as a building block of place-attachment. The concept of place-identity represents the importance of physical surroundings in the ongoing construction of one's conscious (and unconscious) sense of self.

Research on place-identity suggests that our relationships with the environment are more complex than simply living in it. Proshansky, way back in 1978, suggested that place-identity adds an element of meaning and purpose to life by characterizing places as sources of personal identification and affiliation. 

It has also been suggested that all aspects of one's identity, more or less, have place-related associations. One can think of 'place' as both social placement and in spatial geographic terms. As such, one’s social or personal identity grows through exposure to particular facets of a geographic area as well as the personal and social interactions occurring there.

The landscape of the external world, at least in part, is also reflected in the ever-changing neural landscape of the brain. French neuroscientist Catherine Malabou, in her 2008 book What Should We Do with Our Brain?, suggests that identity is dialectical in nature. This is to say, it has an element of 'plasticity' and is constantly 'becoming' through experience in the world and communication with others. 

I'm certainly no neuroscientist, but it makes sense to think of the formation and (re)formation of neural networks as informing the mind’s development through conceptions of self and sociocultural relations with the external world. As a philosopher at the cutting edge of critical social theory, Malabou suggests the brain and, by extension, the mind, with its inherent and multiplicitous senses of self, are caught in tensions between constancy and creation. This affective sturm-und-drang at the edges of semantic availability are social construction in process. We are our synapses, Malabou suggests, and consciousness is nothing less than how the owner of “the movie-in-the-brain” emerges within the epic self-produced biopic of Life.

To look at it in another way; in our increasingly networked and 'virtual' society it may seem that we shrink into individualistic tele-cocoons with an influx of information increasingly sculpted to fit our preconceived beliefs and values. These cocoons might not be the solipsistic trappings of a leading role in the movie-in-the-brain, the droll romantic comedy of self, but the confluence of external yet highly personalized media networks. Castells, in his 2009 book Communication Power, suggests just this. People, according to Castells, do not necessarily “withdraw into the isolation of virtual reality.” Instead, by using the modern wealth of communication networks, people selectively expand their sociability. Further, suggests Castells - a communications professor at UCLA, constructing a world in terms of projects and dispositions, people also modify that world according to the ongoing social, yet often highly mediated and sometimes virtual, construction of personal interests and values. In this way, identity development through such symbolic interaction occurs across many planes, in places both very real and hyper-mediated, from the immediate and embodied to the distanced and virtual by virtue of the Network Society.

Identity formation occurs between people as much as within the self and it is the result of contact with different people and places over time. Language then becomes the “force that binds people to places,” as Yi-Fu Tuan has written. Similar to Cantrill & Senecah’s development of the 'sense of self-in-place' construct; Dixon & Durrheim suggest that it is through language that “everyday experiences of self-in-place form and mutate” and it is through language that “places themselves are imaginatively constituted” in ways that have repercussions for ‘who we are’ and/or ‘who we claim to be.’ Relocating place-identity from the “vault of the mind” and plunging it back into “the flux of human dialogue;” researchers Dixon & Durrheim suggest a discursive approach to studying place-identity. In this way, identity is something people create together through communication. In this sense it is a social construction rooted in connection with places and other beings associated with those places. Such identification can also become motivational when attempting to prod individuals toward environmentally protective behaviors in as much as when one identifies with a place, he or she is more likely to act in protective ways to help preserve that place.