Who am I?

This essay will define knowing who I am as understanding my self as a unified whole. With this, I argue that since the self is ever-changing, I do not know who I am.

Deleuze claimed that “the self does not undergo modifications, it is itself a modification” (79). As a process of “modification,” the self is a dynamic flux of becoming rather than a static kind of being—it is ever-changing. This is the case because the self is conditioned by ever-changing sociocultural contexts. Sociocultural contexts must be ever-changing because new ideas and values are constantly being constructed. An example is fashion: I decide what to wear based on what is currently considered “stylish” or “trendy” for a specific generation, season, city, etc., because if I do not, I may not conform to society’s aesthetic values at a particular point in time and could be judged negatively. Thus, my self (through actions, desires, etc.) is delimited by a fear of nonconformity to sociocultural contexts that are themselves bound to shift over time.

A possible counterargument to this is that I may still be able to overcome these sociocultural contexts. This should be rejected because the desire to reject a certain sociocultural context must be driven by beliefs and values in opposition to it, and these beliefs and values are only accessible to the self as a result of another sociocultural context. This is because beliefs and values are products of my society and culture—even at the most basic level through language (which is socioculturally determined). For example, if I choose to prefer jazz music against the dominant sociocultural context that conditions me to prefer pop music, this choice will not only be driven by beliefs and values from an alternative sociocultural context on why jazz is superior, but is also only possible if my language allows me to understand what jazz is in the first place. Hence, ever-changing sociocultural contexts still always have control over me, because even the act of rejecting them would be in virtue of a different ever-changing context.

The context-dependent self is thus ever-changing, and this means the self cannot be understood as something that can persist over time as a unified whole. This is because I cannot foresee the future of my self (due to lacking power over the sociocultural contexts which condition me), so I cannot know how exactly I will change. I can only reflect upon the past and present to attempt to understand the fleeting fragments of my self that exist at each point in time—and by definition, these fragments cannot constitute my self as a complete whole.

Thus, due to temporal limitations, I cannot understand my self in a way that is unified or whole—I do not know who I am. While this is ostensibly a bleak conclusion, the self’s unknowability and fluidity is really what creates its beauty: a capacity for growth.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, 1994.