To be too identified with the group would be experienced as oppressive. And yet, one of the worst forms of social punishment is banishment from the group, with its rehearsals in childhood: "go and stand in the corner, facing the wall."

Conformity is to be mocked, but so is pretension, and we are always doing both. Our communities, our mother-tongues, attract us and repel us. They give us our places from which to speak, our ways of being, with which we both identify and dis-identify.

Sticking with the theme of childhood, isn't one of the earliest experiences of identification our finding out who we are and what we're like from our parents? They tell us what we need -- does baby need feeding? does baby need wiped? They mirror back to us what they perceive as our traits. Naturally, this reflects their own fantasies and fears. Later, when we're asked to describe ourselves, often we're describing these early descriptions.

So if identification in one sense is an identification with history, the dead, in another sense it is an identification with the descriptions of ourselves offered by others. We call the latter a personality. And a personality is just a more-or-less convenient fantasy to enable us to survive and get along without tearing one another apart.

It seems obvious that neither history nor the mirroring of others can fully capture who we are, for all that we might put every ounce of spare energy into fortifying our identities. We could never be fully self-identical. That is why, as Rimbaud put it, "I is another". Or, as per Othello, "I am not what I am".

And why we can never be anything other than ambivalent about identities, which are always ambivalent about us: they chew us up but they spit us out as well.

III.  Ambiguity and complexity are not necessarily disadvantages. Not knowing what we're talking about is never a bad place to begin, as long as it enables us to de-familiarise 'identity'; to dis-identify with it.

If 'identity' is a complex concept, it might well be what Moran, following Raymond Williams, calls a keyword.

A key compresses lots of complex information, enabling us to quickly decode or unlock something. A keyword condenses complex and various meanings because it describes, informs and is part of equally complex social changes.

From this point, the bewildering polysemy of identity is useful, because it gives us an enviable point of access to the way in which social practices and institutions covered by it have been evolving. And anyway, as Moran shows, the complexity can be pared down for analysis to three types of meaning: legal identity, personal identity, and social identity.

The legal sense of 'identity' tells us something about the rise of political controls, policing techniques, borders, and so on. A legal person must be self-identical for the purposes of prosecution or deportation. The distribution of modern citizenship rights depends on identity in this sense, as the contemporary panics about 'identity theft' and 'identity fraud' demonstrate.

The personal sense of identity brings with it something else, on top of self-sameness: the idea of identity as a substantive property and proprietorial substance. It is something we can own: 'my' identity, 'my' uniqueness, 'my' belonging. The qualities described as identity are assumed to be both in some sense 'deep', at one's 'core', and yet also fluid and constructed. Identity in this sense is also something that can be consumed; we can introject objects offered to us on the market, invest them with libido, and make of them a new side of our selves.

The third, social sense of identity, would appear at first glance to be a purely external idea of identity: your identity is just how the world has classified you. And yet it also usually invokes a substantive property inherent in the group, something internal and common to all its members, which must in turn be registered publicly and politically.

IV.  What is clear is that at least these last two senses of identity entail a form of essentialism; the substantial self-sameness of individuals and communities, howsoever conceived, being of the essence. But if identity is a reifying category, what is it that is being reified, and how?

According to Moran, it is the 'social logic of capitalism' itself which, by governing the range of people's actions, incentives, expectations, motives and commitments, produces certain distinctly capitalist patterns of signification. Signification, as a means of semantic production, depends for its repertoires on the everyday, ordinary practices and behaviours that it arises in.

Identity-talk, therefore, derives some of its common-sensical force from the surrounding framework of property rights, and possessive individualism: the idea that we are the proprietors of our own distinctive qualities. The ability to master and dispose of these qualities is the essence of capitalist freedom. The ability to acquire and trade off, to brand and re-brand, is at the core of practical citizenship.

Likewise, in the post-war era, the emergence of consumption as a major social and cultural activity, as a leisure pursuit, and then as a social-comparative and competitive pursuit, lent itself to the idea that we could consume different selves -- because, in fact that is exactly what we began to do.

The emergence of modern forms of security and biopolitics, with rights and state access predicated on identity built over the edifices of older forms of racial sovereignty and patriarchy, would add another layer to the cultural force-field in which identity emerged as a keyword.

It would, of course, be at best negligent and at worst culpable to leave it at capitalist common sense. There are other senses, residual cultures, resistant formations, and they too shape the conflicted structure of identities.

V.  This brings us back to ambivalence, a dynamic played out every day in our relationships with others.

The romantic relationship merely has the potential to raise this omnipresent force to its most volatile pitch. The romantic relationship, with its swings between desire and repulsion. The separation anxiety and intrusion anxiety. The orgasmic melting of bodies and the post-nuptial separation and need to be alone, and conversely the blazing row followed by blissful make-up sex. The strange ecstasies of the hatefuck wherein identification and dis-identification are combined. We are always striving for, and not finding, the 'right distance' from the moving object of our identifications.

Part of being in nature and yet unnatural is that we are social animals, yet also anti-social, yearning toward unity and separation. According to Paul Verhaeghe, this is nothing less than the pull of Eros and Thanatos. Which is to say that identity is both eroticised and necrotised. 

Now that this is integrated within the infrastructure of platform capitalism, -- wherein identities are as fragile as the weak ties sustained online and yet essentialised and procured and cultivated like property -- don't we see this erotic and necrotic dialectic of identity played out everyday online? Isn't it the sadomasochistic script of our combined self-identifications and self-loathings, without any mediating ludic structure?

The tempestuous rows within internet communities, the toxic pulsions of identification and dis-identification, the passionate solidarities and sudden rows when we find we're not really as alike as we thought. The libidinised investment in online 'celebrities' which turns suddenly and horrifically awry once our identifications disappoint us and we begin to berate and degrade them.

Identity is, yes, necrological. It is also -- and co-constitutively -- passionately erotic.