Lost in the homotopia
Recently, I was chatting at the pub with a friend of mine. It was a planned conversation — something intellectual, to talk about a project he’s working on.
We got to speaking about the difference between personality and identity. I’m a sociologist, so I trade in the idea of social phenomena, and I put identity in that category. It’s about the things with which we identify, the way people ‘identify’ us, the groups to which we belong, the way we get categorised. Personality, on the other hand, refers to those innate traits and dispositions, features of our mental and emotional makeup — cognitive processes that take place in the brain and manifest as character.
When asked to describe himself, my friend used words like ‘curious’ and ‘strong’, and while I agree with that, it doesn’t mark him out as particularly unique (I know many people who are curious and strong). Those are descriptors of personality. They’re the kinds of terms people always reach for when I ask that question. If I ask you right now to describe who you are, people naturally reach for phrases like “happy” or “driven” or “friendly”.
Identity is about the features of your life that give content and concrete expression to those psychological tendencies. It happens in the space between people — where all social things happen — and it isn’t entirely in your control. When I think of my identity, I usually say that I’m a Sydney-sider, but a Coastie (someone from the Central Coast), I say that I work at the University of Sydney and that I study education, sociology and philosophy. I think of myself as a writer, I definitely identify as gay, I am left-wing but annoyingly pragmatic to those on the left, and so on.
In short, my identity is made up of all of these social features that not only exist prior to me (I am not the first Coastie, or the first gay, these are all categories that are produced in the social world), but that in their specific intersection with my personality produce Pat Norman.
What happens, my friend asked, when someone doesn’t feel like they fit in either world? He said this in the context of someone who felt like there was no place for them in ‘the gay world’, but no place in the straight world either (because he is gay). The metaphor he used was from Stranger Things, and for those of you who don’t watch it, let me try to summarise it as easily as possible.
A young girl in Stranger Things, named Eleven, has the ability to slip between our world and the dark, twisted dystopia of ‘The Upside Down’: a decaying inverse of our world, inhabited by monsters who feed on people from our reality by dragging them into The Upside Down. When she is young, Eleven first develops this ability through a kind of telepathic connection. When blindfolded, she can reach out with her mind to find another person and ‘spy’ on them.
Now, when she is in this spying state, the television show has nothing but black space around her. It is just Eleven wandering around a void, searching for another person — who is isolated in that void, but going about their life unaware of the spy. Eleven moves freely in this untextured, uncultured, antisocial space. And it’s in this kind of space — caught between worlds — that my friend said he sometimes felt.
Michel Foucault first introduces the idea of the heterotopia in The Order of Things (though his essay Of Other Spaces develops it in a much more thorough way). A heterotopia is a ‘world within a world’, a space that mirrors the broader world in disturbed way. Think of how a graveyard functions as a community of the dead — a necropolis, or the way prisons have their own economies and social networks, just isolated and separated from the world outside, which they are reflecting. Narratively, The Upside Down functions as a kind of heterotopia: it is a disturbed, distorted version of our world, the physical structure of it rotting away, buildings decomposing, even the neoliberal instinct of 1980’s capitalism is concretised in the physical form of the ‘Mind Flayer’ — the powerful ruler of The Upside Down.
Hetero, of course, refers to difference. A field that is heterogenous is characterised by variation and difference (and heterosexuality refers to attraction to a different sex). The process of homogenisation makes things ‘the same’, it (paradoxically, from a queer reading) normalises, it straightens things out. This is the joy of queer theory, actually, that everything gets turned in on itself. It gets turned upside down, so to speak. So if The Upside Down from Stranger Things is a heterotopia, what can we make of the metaphoric space between worlds?
You might think of it as a homotopia. Everything in this textureless space is the same, and that is that it is blackness, darkness, the absence of anything. A void. There is no culture, no identity, no orientation and no anchor. It is an inhuman space, or at least it is in the way that we can’t conceive of identity and meaning in a space that lacks any kind of language or symbolism with which to communicate. Perhaps this is why this is the space through which Eleven must pass in order to reach into the minds of others: the loss of self seems like an appropriate move when your goal is to inhabit the space of the other.
It’s a mistake to think that The Upside Down is the opposite of our world — it isn’t, it’s far too similar to be the opposite! And the world within which a heterotopia resides is not the opposite of that heterotopia (a graveyard is not the opposite of a living community, nor is a prison), but rather a parent, or the sun whose light is reflected in the mirror which a heterotopia holds up to it.
I think the idea of an ‘identity crisis’ comes not just from psychological concerns — anxiety, shame, or whatever other pathology a person might ascribe to the condition. There’s a social dimension to it as well: it’s as though a person has slipped into this textureless world, the uncultured space of the homotopia. Our identities are made up of multiple intersecting social positions: ethnicity, language, local community, sexuality, gender identity, class, culture, religion and so on. These aren’t biologically predetermined, but socially influenced (I won’t say determined, there’s just too much slippage in the social world to be so certain about things). If we allow our sense of identity to become overdetermined, to allow one domain (say, religion) to structure in an absolute way our understanding of ourselves, then what happens when there is a crisis in that world? How fundamental can loss of faith be to a person’s identity — it’s as though you would have to start from scratch, to reassess who you are, to begin to add colour back into the featureless terrain of the homotopia. Perhaps for some young gay men, there is both a social crisis and a personal crisis — something sociological and something psychological — that leads some people into the world of the spy, the homotopia.
Sociology is a discipline that looks at what happens to groups, and it’s always important to keep disciplinary focus in mind when you’re doing this kind of theorising. Psychology and psychological literature is notorious for making inferences far beyond its scope. Jordan Peterson likes to explain why people wear lipstick or relate to other sexes purely in terms of evolutionary biological and psychological traits. He sets aside the cultural ways these predispositions manifest (and that’s where his argument is weakest). Alan Downes, in The Velvet Rage, doesn’t necessarily seek to explain the social texture of certain behaviours, but his book is written in a way (and Oprah-fied into the popular gay imagination) that many people I know draw inferences from that far exceed his focus.
There’s not a huge deal of ‘popular sociology’ out there, at least not as much as there is popular psychology. That’s a real shame I think, and maybe one day it’s a situation I can address. It’s a shame because our behaviour isn’t just explained by our psychological state of mind. It takes on specific forms and content based on our social world. We are social beings, the way we interact with one another is formed in the space between us, not just in our heads. The way we think, the images and symbols and language we use to communicate, is something given to us and often we have very little control over that. We seek to belong — it’s a psychological impulse, and a social one. And belonging involves integrating elements of a community and a culture into our identity. The more varied and diffused that identity, the more heterogenous and diverse the experiences we draw on, and the more comfortable we are with our complex and deeply social natures, the less likely we are to slip into the textureless darkness of the other space.
Let a thousand flowers bloom!
