This post is a mess. It needs editing. But I just need to get it out, so here it is, raw.

It is a category mistake to treat identity as a self-classification, expressing essentially our self-concept: the What that we understand or will ourselves to be.

Rather, identity is derived from the being(s) in whom we participate as participant. Our participation takes the form of a role we perform in the life of a particular transcendent being.

So, Butler is right: identity is performed, and it is the performance which constitutes and actualizes it.

This role is not (or at least best not) performed in the sense of theater performances, where an author invents a character and puts that character on a stage to be experienced by an audience of spectators. Or at least, this is not always case, nor is it the most common, normal case.

Identity is performed in the sense of “performance” meant when we speak of job performance or performing one’s duties. We perform our identities by performing our responsibilities within an organization.

This is why the luckier among us identify with their jobs.

When we are happy at work, we are able to perform in our assigned role, and the theater of that role — (and there is always and necessarily some amount of dissemblance in any acting of even the most perfectly suitable, internalized role) — does not interfere with the efficient, effective execution of our assigned responsibilities.

When we are a poor fit for our role — when we want to do different work, or work in a way that makes it difficult for others to collaborate with us — we must either persuade others in the organization to work differently in order to accommodate us (so that the role we want to play fits with the workings of the organization) or we must leave the organization and find another (or found another) that suits us better. We must find an organization whose organizational roles provide us an organic role we can play naturally or second-naturally — one with which we can identify.

And if the entire economy is such that no such role does, or can, exist — then what? Then we are radical misfits! Misfits have no reason to feel loyalty to an ecosystem of organizations — an economy — all of whom deny them a role or a place.

In fact, such organizations inspire feelings of intense alienation and hostility. Being forced to play any available role in any organization in that ecosystem requires total self-betrayal, abandonment of all intuitive understanding, spontaneous response to conditions, complete non-natural artifice.

But enough about me and my problems. Back to identity…

To the degree we take part in the life of a transcendent being — to the degree our sense of self derives from participation in this being — to the degree our self as we understand ourselves is identical with who we are as participant in some collective being who transcends our own being — we feel belonging, loyalty, love for “our people” — a sense of identity.

This sense of identity is not primarily a matter of shared characteristics or qualifying criteria for some categorization. It is not primarily the function of shared memory of lived experiences. It is not primarily a doctrinal effect, an agreement that the same facts are true, false, good, bad, important or irrelevant. These phenomena are real. But they mere outward symptoms of an underlying condition of belonging to something — a collective someone — in whom our own individuality is rooted, from whom our sense of meaning flows.

But if these symptoms of identity are only symptoms, not organic expressions of something deeper — if they are pure theater, stage paint, costumes and recitation of lines — performed for an audience of spectators and critics — the collective being in whom we participate might be real, but it is real only in its commitment to illusion, deception, delusion, and alienation from what bestows meaning and deeper reality.

We need identity. We cannot do without it. But it is not a thing we can assign to ourselves or impose upon others. It is not an individual action. It is something we must seek in collective life beyond the individual and then pursue and cultivate and eternally renegotiate.

It is all incredibly difficult. It seems impossible, even. But this apparent impossibility is just the veil of oblivion that conceals infinite possibility and protects our delicate finitude. If you look closer into this oblivion, you’ll see a halo glowing behind the nothingness, illuminating it like an opal nebula. That glow announces exnihilism: Creation is miraculous, and always seems impossible until after it has happened, and become inevitable.

Misfits, let us pray together that we may someday find our proper place. That we may belong somewhere, to someone greater than any individual self, rooted in an infinitely renewable source of meaning.