Signature and Identity By Jan Valentin Sæther

Identity is a manifold thing. A corpse can be identified. Our identity survives us. We can have an identity that is maintained on sporadic facts purely in someone’s brain. Like a friend of a friend. That’s important. We need to keep track of such things. We must apply ourselves to our social intelligence to be functional. Like the continued existence of my great grandmother in my memory. Barely enough to say: Yes that is my great grandmother. Yet, more than her bleached portrait in the family album,- it is the familial residue of her vita, different fragments of memories that various family members have held and passed on. A little like identifying Jesus by scripture. Scriptures written from memory by several writers. Except, my great grandmother of course, has warranted much less attention. Never the less, such little clinging we exert in maintaining identities as they fade, ever so near into oblivion, is the hallmark of our consciousness, our bulwark against death and the mother of all stories.

One thing I know about my great grandmother is that she was Norwegian. That is something. It gives me an added sense of her. True or false. Probably neither. It would probably be fair to say that she was more Norwegian than me, in the sense that certain things would be more predictable in her case, - like diet, the interior of her house or knitting in traditional patterns.

Are we less Norwegian today? Tricky question. I certainly feel less Norwegian than the nationalist that navigates historical cultural waters with no concern for the fascist exploits of our recent past. Liking it or not, my identity is softwired into all that I can identify.

Genesis remarks on man’s gift to identify what is in the heavens and on the earth and with it celebrates the mystery of the name and the word. This capacity is seen free from the entanglement with good and evil of the same story. Hardly. Both identifying the world around us and the issue of our own identity is inseparably linked together in the production of our world view and hence to our unstable sense of self.

Nevertheless, we can in certain connections be satisfactorily practically identified by the auxiliary connections we have to such things as nationality and profession. We say, ‘You know, that Swedish gold medalist!’ Or, - the notions we form in response to; ‘he is a French scientist’, - as if it would render some inexplicable element of frenchness to his identity welded together in a way that is not even vaguely scientific. It is even possible to say there is something typically American about an American expatriot.

National identities are particularly disturbing applications of the idea as signification because they spawn some of the deepest shades of human undertakings. Like mixing race and purity. On the same topic nations also exerts boundless celebratory efforts to maintain the honor of its national heroes. Memories, stories and personalities make up the bulk of material on our media and information highways, and is ironically more and more often based on superficial data.

The willingness to go to war to protect national security is sold to the public on the basis of the idea of shared identity. But such identification, as much as it is good for the state it tampers with and actually functions to postpone the deeper questions of identity as something of a profoundly personal nature. I can be known without knowing myself. My friends see me from away lumbering up the hill. Its a gray day and I am dressed in gray. ‘Hey’, they say: ‘there is J coming.’ The same gest ure which is invisible to myself is my very signature to them.

‘Know thyself’, was written over the gates to the mysteries in Delphi. I sense that this knowing would dissolve all these musings in an acid bath which rendered all uses of identity so meaningless as to restate the question: What are we? Where do we come from? Or as Hamlet concluded after his search for identity faded into dying. The question that leaves us with this final answer: ‘The rest is silence.’

Jan Valentin Saether