What once determined repeated processes of identity configuration was represented by the so-called " possessive individualism ": I exist because I possess. The process of identity construction and the consequent reconfigurations of the subject, within an increasingly stratified and plural society, have acquired different representations. Being-there as substance, said Heidegger, but today, in an era in which the social field is increasingly conflictual and even virtual, how are the subject and its being-there in the world constituted?
A question of identity
The current context, increasingly virtual and dominated by new media, builds-reconstructs other identities and postulates mechanical solidarity, relationships that are unhinged by space/time categories, but free from any substantialist approach. Virtual friendships, number of followers e like on the most disparate platforms or technologies of power, paraphrasing Foucault, represent the driving force of every new process of constituting the subject. Questioning theidentity and its cultural dimension, within the increasingly globalized political field, means adopting deconstructionist approaches and understanding its socially constructed nature. Identity means identical and relies on referential approaches, regardless of pluralist approaches. The process of "homogenization" of society and essentialization of the individual, implemented by paternalistic policies and objectifying rhetoric, obscures the fallacious nature of the subject's identity construction process. The social actor exists as monad and as a solipsistic being, nothing could be more misleading. The individual, precisely because it is indivisible, exists in report, therefore, in us.
Social distance
The recourse to iconologically constituted categories and to the rhetoric of the globalization they therefore conceal evasions linguistics which, in the era of Trumpian walls, from the international terrorism, of the fervent and nostalgic nationalisms e patriotisms various, increase only and exclusively false beliefs and dialectics of the proxemics/kinesics of the social distance, which, in addition to being expressed linguistically, takes the form of actual bodily techniques, through which we trace identity boundaries and social spaces marked by a clear line of demarcation. How can we perceive the other? In such a context, the prejudicial approach is undoubtedly the most widespread, but revealing the fallacy of such constructions is one of the tasks of anthropology and sociology. Value systems, beliefs, endoxa, identity-building policies, and processes of standardization, as well as the normalization of violence, inevitably lead to increased distance. But are we sure that the social actor is merely acted upon and not already an agent?
homo ludens
That the individual was disciplined, but with a certain autonomy, by thehabitus, a device internalized by the subject which allows him, assimilating body techniques and modus operandi, to live in the world, the French sociologist had predicted Pierre BourdieuThe individual, in fact, reacts and is himself a cultural product/producer. How then should we interpret identity and relationships today, in the era of representation/representativeness? There are multiple devices that allow thehomo ludens to represent and configure one's identity within a "discursive formation." Fake, virtual identities, instant messaging, heterotopic spaces, and plural fields activate mechanisms of reconfiguration of the self, and the individual, polysemously characterized, adopts plural identities without ever remaining caged within secularized monads. How can we pretend to categorize the social actor a priori if he is himself a cultural producer? The individual exists in the plural, in the report and regardless of Kantian categories. Rather, the correct question to answer is: why does the individual want to be present at a distance, but in fact, doesn't express the same sensations, filtered by the media, in person?
Keyboard Lion
Is it a crisis of presence, or does the actor prefer to identify himself through the playful aspect of life and free time? What kind of relational dynamics are created? What kind of identity does the individual who activates multiple social media profiles , who reads but doesn't respond to messages, who communicates extensively via keyboard yet is embarrassed in front of others—what kind of identity does he construct? What do such social actions conceal? What is the latent meaning of the actions performed by homo ludens ? Constructing pluralistic policies of self-representation and responding to the needs created by society and by himself. It seems reasonable to agree, therefore, that beyond the medium, man shapes himself through dialectical and contingent processes of constitutiveness, effectively abandoning any referential and tautological theory of the phenomenology of the self.
Sociologically
