Seventh Variation
Identity is double, triple, quadruple and multiple as the lives that each one of us leads People search for a life that would be called “bicoastal” in the United States, with a house on one coast of the ocean and a job on the other coast, or, better, a different occupation for each day of the week. The remote-control metaphor prevails. An existential channel surfing.

In the modern conception, identity corresponds to a character in a novel, with a monotonous life or a life full of events, with changes in self-perception. Life could be monocord or well orchestrated and varied, but in any case, just one: identity likewise, simple or complex, was one. Doctor Jekyll doubling as Mr Hyde was still considered a monster, schizophrenia a personality disorder. Duplicity, multiplicity, caused the same astonishment of the Duke of Orsino in front of Sebastian: “One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons, / A natural perspective, that is and is not!”

In contemporaneity, identity is in part characterized by an excess in the shape of the ego; the individual re-emerges everywhere, “contaminated” by a widespread culture of narcissism: the viewpoint with which and from which one measures different realities is that internal subjectual one. Today, the “humanistic manager” must be aware that people want to live more than just one life (or rather just one story), but many stories and many lives together. It is the metaphor of the remote control. Everyone wants to live as many experiences together as there are TV channels and jump from one to the other, watching all of them. On the other hand, precisely because of this, the person lives in a condition of permanent instability: identity is continually overwritten, fragmented in different affiliations, often overlapping and sometimes contradicting. In our times, “in the liquid modernity”, the anxieties, the pains and the feelings of insecurity caused by ‘living in society’ need a patient and constant work of interrogation regarding reality and how individuals ‘position’ themselves in it”. We are faced with the continuous, daily experimentation of an epistemological passage from discovery to invention: “Identity reveals us only as something that should be invented, rather than discovered”. Individual identity is something that one perceives from a distance like the goal of daily effort, to build from the bottom or to choose between different alternatives. Faced with the slow but inexorable process of institutional destructuring, faced with the experiential revolution of time and space, one experiences identity “mainly, as a task”.

In this sense, man’s identity today is that of an author or producer, whilst in the modern era it was that of a figure, and in post-modern times, fragmented into many characters in search of an author. At an individual level, this passage is fed by an emerging need to invigorate an otherwise banal daily experience with the force of the imagination, to escape the confined horizons within which our life would be confined. Remo Bodei explained this well, when he asserted that “fables, novels, poems, history books, travel stories, theatre, cinema, television or the Internet are bringing us out from withdrawing into ourselves, activating the seeds that are latent within us, unfolding new worlds, and injecting new ideas, passions and sensations that would otherwise remain precluded [...]. Today, the weight of literature has increased enormously, from the media to the visual arts, offering a much wider and varied repertoire of lives and experiences. For that matter, Madame de Staël had already declared that we no longer feel anything that we do not seem to recall having already read somewhere. With the spread of literacy and audio-visual media (also accessible to illiterate people), the catalogue of private lives accessible to the imagination currently involves billions of people [...]. Can the sense of reality be saved from the risk of its dissolution into fantasy? [...] Salvation does not consist in refusing the experience of unreality, in looking for immunity from fantasy and desire. The ideal would be – as with a piano – to play keyboard of reality with the right hand in G, more melodic and continuous, and that of the imagination, which represents the necessary accompaniment, the complementary integration with reality, with the left hand, in a lower key.”

Down with boundaries and definitions, it was once said. Often one has the sensation when faced with the collapse of various points of reference, that identity becomes a mosaical construction, “a puzzle with difficult and changeable solutions”. The final awareness is that the work of building an identity does not start from an ideal-final image to be aimed for – instead, it is “means oriented”. In other words, one goes on with what one has, guided less by an idealized and idealizing process and more by the market availability “of pieces that you have already come to own or that you feel are worth having”.

Then, perhaps, more than the music for piano played by Bodei, the programme schedule should become the archetype of the life most desired. That in which everything has meaning because the most important thing is not the individual programmes, but t what each individual edits of his/her experiences . This is consistent with the findings of recent sociological studies: the emergence of a mindstyle, that of searching for distinctive abilities, or rather exploring new dimensions of one’s personality. The countercheck is offered by the extraordinary success of events that at one time were elitist, not just like the festival of literature in Mantua or cinema in Venice, but even like the “lecturae Dantis” that are multiplying in Milan and many other Italian cities. Everywhere, exhibitions of Picasso, Chagall or Klee draw crowds of the young and not so young. It is enough to propose concerts of experimental music in Rome or a philosophy festival in Modena to assure an immediate success with the public. In this context, we read in Il Messaggero, “Literature is done by reading, music by word, page by stave, orality by verse and note. And in this throwing of the rules of the game into confusion, in this offering of contamination that follows and captures spectators, our way of intending Literature and Music also changes …thus they not only consume the Roman summers, but those of all Italy. The fashion-mania of reading, for some years now, has not just won over the general public, but has converted mayors, councillors, politicians and, increasingly, publishers to its formula” (“Il Messaggero”, 23^rd June 2004, If the written word does not suffice, by Fiorella Iannucci) .

Newspapers and magazines today can only maintain sales thanks to gadgets: which are increasingly volumes of poetry, new editions of modern and contemporary novels, monographs dedicated to painting or photography, classical music or jazz CDs, and video cassettes or DVDs of successful films, which are not necessarily those based on special effects or gratuitous violence. The “special effects” that people need today pertain to inner, emotional and deeply significant dimensions.

A demanding challenge for companies that find themselves with these people as customers and, at the same time, work by integrating into the organizations the experiences of citizens of that which Javier Echeverría has called Telepolis, the computer-age “brand new global city”, surpassing the functional metropolis of Le Corbusier and post-modern Las Vegas.

In its elementary phase, Telepolis was made of telephone and radio communications; then non-interactive television was added […]. Now, finally, interactive television is in sight, the Internet and e-mail spread, the teleslaves attain the word and Telepolis is internalized by its planetary citizens.

Here then, instruments such as television or the World Wide Web are not metaphors or technologies or methods of communication. Interactive, digital TV and the convergence between communications tools are models, representations of mental schemes already metabolized by man in contemporary thought. One must acknowledge the fact that the convergence is a truth of the reality that we currently live. Everyone looks for convergence between different needs and between different identities, imagining being able to be many different persons at the same time. A multi-faceted oneness.

On the other hand, under the thrust of the new technologies, this process risks transforming itself into real fragmentation, especially in relation to virtual development, which allows the coexistence of alternative realities, all similarly “true”, in which the perceptive mechanisms are in some way changed with respect to the “real” reality. There are two salient characteristics of these concomitant identities. Firstly, the different identities that we field generally have a partial characteristic, in the sense that none of them seems to represent us completely. Even at the sensorial level, one is dealing with identities that are diminished or shielded, so to speak. Let’s think of the way in which we are identifiable in a virtual communications environment, such as a chat session. However evolved these environments are they do not allow a full mobilization of all senses: they privilege some to the detriment of others. The perceptive regulation mechanism, according to which we measure dimensions, distances and intensities, and compare out identity with those of others, is thus found to be altered. Secondly, two alternative identities can be mutually contradictory. A classic, in this sense, is gender confusion (male instead of female and vice versa); to which users in online communications environments make ample recourse. Masking and catching the interlocutor off-guard are among the defences that the individual uses for increasing his/her margins of freedom. And in these cases, resorting to avatars (graphical representations that identify the presence and position of an individual in the virtual world) do nothing but increase the effect du réel. Plurivocal self-portrayal has obvious effects – devastating in some cases – on the traditional organizational mechanisms. Here are some:
a) proliferation of collective and informal sub-identities (communities of practice and discussion groups, for example) that overlap the identifying function of the organizational chart and sometimes cause it problems,
b) partial disinvestment of individual’s identity with respect to the organization, little receptiveness to mobilization and growing sense of disenchantment regarding corporate symbols and rituals (de-identification),
c) greater internal conflict,
d) greater difficulties in exercising leadership and in managing contractual situations (with the proliferation of identities, in fact, there is not necessarily a corresponding improvement in organizational communication).

If these are the risks connected with new communications and information technologies, they offer every author the opportunity not only of greater freedom of choice (“if you like football you can go to the stadium or watch a match on TV – if you like cinema you can watch a video cassette or go to the cinema – if you like nature you can go on a safari or watch a programme on geography”), but also of rendering control of his/her own expressive model more profound and articulate. Let’s consider Homer: having access to a computer memory, the compositional model based on the assembly of standard blocks could have been brought to the highest levels of complexity and all theoretically foreseen combinatorial possibilities could have been explored. Let’s consider Dante: every theoretically possible rhyme starting from a given dictionary could have been tried (and the choice of what to add to the text would have remained with the author). And let’s consider Proust: the wonderful capacity of building a system would have been enormously strengthened by computer memory: just think of the possibility at the moment in which the author writes, of having at hand, via a selective operation carried out with absolute precision by the machine, all of the information regarding that figure, or that situation, already inserted in the text.

Yet this does not violate the author’s independence: all authors remain themselves, free to “close” the text as desired, or rather to include or exclude narrative material and reading paths. In short: using a word processor, Homer Dante and Proust would have had at their disposition a vast range of material consistent with their projects and a much greater repertoire of links between the elements, without any of this taking away their faculty to choose some of the material and some of the links in making a final draft. A valid analogy: in the same way as the author sees his independent creativity strengthened by information technology, so does the manager. It is the profound sense of what is known as “Business Intelligence”: information and knowledge are no longer closed in procedures, but plastically made available by the decision-maker. By the creator of worlds. Individuality, multi-individuality – in both cases are boosted by technological implant.

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