The Body and Identity in Bronze Age Mindset

In this post, I want to look at the conception of identity that BAP puts forward in his critique of what he refers to as the transgender understanding of identity. To be clear, in the following I’m not concerned with either BAP’s treatment of transgenderism or transgenderism itself. Instead, I want to focus on how BAP handles the relationship between what could be called substance and meaning, which has been the central concern of my previous two posts (“Some Notes on BAP and Sade” and “Why Harassment Architecture and Marquis de Sade are Boring”). BAP’s treatment of identity in Bronze Age Mindset is consonant with the rest of what could be referred to as the “Bronze Age Project.” It is with the object of continuing to examine this “Bronze Age Project” that I turn here to BAP’s conception of identity.

To begin, I’d like to consider the following passage from Bronze Age Mindset in which BAP describes identity. BAP writes:

“This is how they can also get themselves to believe in the transgender: these are people who believe that matter can somehow be corruptly configured, and that we all have disembodied souls with male or female essences. The whole attempt to redefine identity, not just sexual identity, as a matter of decision, meaning decision made arbitrarily, freely, a choice of the intellect or reason, is their desperate reach to find a new justification for the freedom of the will, the soul unrestrained by nature or biology. Such things make no sense when you realize you’re your body and there’s no you aside from this.” (35; my emphasis)

In this passage, BAP denounces the idea that one can freely choose one’s identity. The problem with such an idea, in BAP’s estimation, is that it disregards the body. BAP claims that such a choice isn’t possible because one’s identity isn’t an abstract essence. There are two ways of understanding BAP’s notion of identity as I read him. One is that BAP sees identity as grounded in the body. I’m inclined to think this interpretation is inconsistent with the rest of BAP’s work. The second way of understanding BAP’s conception of identity, and the one that I think is consistent with the rest of the book, is that BAP claims there is no difference between identity and one’s body. As he unequivocally puts it: “you’re your body and there’s no you aside from this.” Not only is this a very strong claim, but I believe this claim evinces the fundamental logic of the “Bronze Age Project.”

I hope readers of my previous posts will have noticed the contrast BAP draws between embodiment and essence in the above passage, which mirrors the tension between substance and meaning that I’ve been outlining. I am in partial agreement with BAP. I concur that you can’t be “you” without your body, or that “there’s no you aside from your body.” However, while I maintain alongside BAP that there’s no disembodied soul—that the body is necessary—I don’t believe that the body is sufficient. Contrary to BAP’s position, I would argue: you can not be “you” with your body. Put another way, your (biological) body can be alive without “you” (your identity) being operative.

To make sense of what I mean by saying that you can not be “you” with your body, consider the example of someone in a coma. The you in a coma (the biological body that is still alive) isn’t the “you” it was prior to the coma (the “you” of your identity is no longer operative). The degree to which you remain “you” (which is to say the extent to which the biological body that’s still alive is understood as “you”) after entering the coma depends upon those exterior to you recognizing you as “you.” In some cases, the body in a comma is no longer (considered to be) “you,” which can lead to the body being unplugged from life support and allowed to die. Critically, for this to happen the loss of “you” must be recognized by others. What can be seen here is the fundamental asymmetry between “you” and your body. This is why I agree with BAP that the notion of a freely chosen identity is absurd. Yet its absurdity doesn’t have to do with identity’s equivalence with the body. Identity is such only insofar as it is recognized by others, which means that identity is never exclusively in one’s own hands and so can’t be freely chosen. This also means that identity is almost always unsatisfying since what others recognize is rarely (if ever) what one would wish others would recognize. Yet the exteriority of identity (or, the fact that identity is social and so can’t be arbitrarily chosen) also means that identity isn’t reducible to a body. While “you” are not exclusively what others recognize and “you” can’t be you without your body, “you” remain irreducible to your body. Identity is neither entirely corporeal nor abstractly chosen, but rather arises from the interaction of (and, importantly, the disjunctions between) what is biological and what is social.

Ironically, identity’s dependence on more than mere substance (i.e., the necessity of a social component to identity) is evident in BAP’s decision to write this passage in the first place. If identity weren’t at all social, debates about identity wouldn’t be possible; one would simply be what one is and arguments to the contrary wouldn’t be possible. However, it seems that what’s at stake in a debate about identity is, to a great extent, identity itself. Even if only  to “disavow” an identity (as BAP suggests is the case with transgender identities in the passage above), debates about identity—as debates—demonstrate that identity isn’t straightforwardly a matter of substance. These debates have consequences, which is (in part) why we engage in them. If such debates weren’t meaningful (if they didn’t have an impact), why would BAP bother to write against this abstract notion of identity? What drives BAP’s polemic? At this juncture, I believe the significance of BAP’s decision to write specifically an exhortation (as opposed to a book of “philosophy” or any other genre) comes into focus: were substance sufficient, BAP’s writing of an exhortation would be nonsensical insofar as an exhortation relies on language and the social (i.e., more than mere substance). In other words, and to draw upon some language from my first post, BAP exhorts because substances don’t speak for themselves.

As an aside, I want to note that I consider BAP’s emphasis on the body to be, in many respects, a helpful corrective to what strikes me as a cultural trend towards disembodiment, or at the very least a general disregard for bodies. I think, for instance, that BAP inspiring people to go to the gym and make health conscious eating decisions is good (especially given the conspicuous lack of treatment these topics have received/are receiving by major media outlets and governments throughout the ongoing COVID-19 debacle). At the same time, (a generous reading of) passages from Bronze Age Mindset like the one above reveal, to my mind, an overcorrection. By equating identity with the body BAP essentializes the body in a way that turns the body itself into a kind of abstract essence beyond our means of making sense of it. An important question that BAP fails to address is: how does one make sense of a body? This is also to ask: how is a body identified? Notably, the difficulty of identity is evident in BAP’s own phrase “you’re your body”: how do we know which body is being talked about (i.e., which body is yours)? Who is this “you” in BAP’s  “you’re”? This is all to as again: how is the body being talked about identified? BAP’s statement is itself disjunctive insofar as a connection must be drawn between the “you” of “you’re” that points and the “body.” This statement speaks to the thirst for (im)mediacy I discussed in my previous post. Similar to BAP’s dream of unmediated sight or his hope for sensors that observe without interference, with the notion of a pure body BAP ultimately presents something like an unlocatable, disembodied body.