(part two of two)

I recently saw a performance (well, four performances — more about that in a moment) by my favorite San Francisco dance company, FACT/SF. The piece, called “Split,” is performed by a single dancer for a single audience member, eight times a night. Four different dancers perform the show in rotation, each with a different, personal interpretation of the choreography. Naturally, then, I went to see it four times.

As you might expect from a piece that’s performed one-on-one, “Split” is largely about identity — or as FACT/SF’s director Charles Slender-White puts it, “the relationship between dissociative episodes and identity formation,” particularly among members of the queer community. In other words, it’s about the experience of finding out that you’re not who you thought you were.

Seeing the show started me on the path of thinking deeply about the nature of identity. “Identity” is a word we use all the time, but it’s not always clear what we mean by it. When I was an undergraduate philosophy major, one of the fields I studied was that of “personal identity,” which addresses questions like “If all the cells in the human body are replaced over a period of seven to ten years, in what sense can I be considered the same individual that I was ten years ago?” But that’s a technical application of the term, and not the way it tends to be used in ordinary conversation.

The news these days is filled with talk about “identity politics,” which is the idea that your membership in a group — particularly a group that has experienced oppression or discrimination — dictates your political agenda. More controversially, it holds that people who are not members of that group cannot understand your life experience, and therefore have no right to speak for you. In this context, identity can be considered simply a collection of categories into which one fits. In any political discussion, I would be considered an old, straight, white, cisgender, Jewish American man.

But does that description really constitute my identity? After all, I didn’t invent those categories. I may have some beliefs about which I fit into, but other people — or society at large — may have different beliefs. If neo-Nazis start rounding up Jews, it won’t help for me to tell them that I’ve never practiced Judaism. In practice, they get to decide my identity; I don’t.

I think that if “identity” is to have any real meaning, it would have to be something that’s inherent in me, not something that’s determined by others. And yet, when people talk about their own experience of establishing an identity, they tend to use those same externally defined categories. We’ve all heard people say “I thought I was straight, but I realized that I’m gay.” “I was assigned male at birth, but I’ve always been a woman.” “My light skin makes people think I’m white, but I’m really Black.” Of course these distinctions have real social and political consequences, but fitting into a particular group or category can hardly constitute who one really is.

So I came to ask, what’s my identity? Descriptors like “American” or “male” may apply to me in a political context, but they don’t resonate with me personally. “Straight” may describe who I’m attracted to, but it doesn’t say anything about who I am. “Old” may characterize my body, but not the being that inhabits it.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that real identity is undefinable and indescribable. I am who I am, and nothing more can be said about it.

It occurred to me that this may be why I’ve always had problems with my name. I’ve never much identified with the name Mark Schaeffer (or, for that matter, either Mark or Schaeffer). When I hear myself referred to that way, my immediate mental reaction is, “Who’s that?” So I’ve always sensed that I have the wrong name, but it all these years, I’ve never been able to figure out what the right one is.

I’ve asked friends — some of whom have changed their own names — what they think my “real” name would be. People have offered suggestions, but all of their proposed names felt equally arbitrary. It’s only recently that I’ve come to realize that all names are arbitrary. They’re just labels that we each put on a collection of cells that’s being replaced every seven to ten years. How do I know that I’m the same individual that I was ten years ago? At least I can say, “Well, I have the same name.”

But my true identity — whatever that is — doesn’t have a name, and it doesn’t have categories. Neither does yours. As I stated in my previous post, the dance is the dance. Now I have to add: The dancer is the dancer.