From present to presentation: A philosophical critique of Hartmut Rosa’s “situational identity”

Hartmut Rosa classifies modernity and late modernity in terms of the “speeding up” or “acceleration” of society. External institutions require constant development in order to maintain themselves, including material growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation. As has been widely noted, this is reflected internally by subjects whose thoughts and attitudes revolve around obsessive calculation, teleological thinking, and desires for Promethean-like control over nature, themselves, and their social environments. Coupled with an increase in functional differentiation, which has fragmented and shrunk once stabilizing and meaning-conferring social roles, Rosa argues that the logic of growth results in subjects whose identity is “situationally” determined. These subjects continually jockey between disparate role-based identities according to whatever situation they happen to be in at a given moment. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s research on self-presentation and the philosophy of genuine pretending as developed by Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio, I will argue that situational identity is even more complex than Rosa has demonstrated. People living in late modern societies construct identities that are multifarious and incongruent in terms of not only roles, but also the very “paradigms of identity”—e.g. sincerity, individualism, authenticity, irony—through which roles are adopted. Problematically, outdated models of identity, based largely on the sincerity and its associated conceptions of the “self” and ethics, continue to dominate, leading to insoluble tensions between various socially-established identities. I will present “profilicity,” the understanding of identity based on profile construction with an acute awareness of the second-order observation, as a paradigm that is increasingly important in today’s world.