When I was taking a college philosophy class we got into the classic debate about where identity resides in a person or thing. If you have a boat and gradually replace every board over the course of five years, is it still the same boat? When did it become a different boat?
The same with humans, if you replace every limb with prosthesis, when does the person cease to be themselves and become a cyborg? When are they essentially a machine?
Sci-Fi really lends itself to the debate: if Capt. Kirk is completely disassembled into atoms and beamed to a planet in a matter transporter and his atoms reassmbled, is he still the same Capt. Kirk that left the Enterprise?
I got to thinking about this topic when I saw the new version of The Magnificent Seven this weekend. There were some significant plot points shared by both the original version and The Seven Samurai, which inspired the original, that weren’t really featured in the newest version. The boastful young gunslinger was missing, for example, but there was a similar plotline in the Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven, which also has a lot of common plot points with both versions of The Magnificent Seven. Westerns in general probably share a lot of the same plot lines with each other if we get right down to it.
I am really only stopping off at The Magnificent Seven to pose a question about the ethics of presenting a group with a famous name which is comprised of few, if any, of the original members. Just because a group has the legal right to use a name, and the controversies over who gets to do so can fill a few blog posts, when does it become an issue of misrepresentation when it comes to audience expectations?
Yes, everyone probably knows that Glenn Miller and all of the members of the original orchestra are no longer playing together when they go to a concert. (There are, in fact, four different groups around the world licensed to use that name.) On the other hand, the keyboardist for the band War is the only original member still performing with the group.
There are some very public debates that rage about whether a band went downhill after a key member left or if the group was better off without the bum, but for the most part people aren’t terribly aware of the shifting line ups of most groups over the years.
If you are thinking of presenting such a group, you may have the unenviable task of determining if the soul and identity of the group has departed and deciding whether to pursue the engagement.
Then there is the related question of, what are people buying? Are they buying an opportunity to relive memories of what they were doing when they heard this song and the line up doesn’t matter so much? Or are they buying a return to their past fandom when they originally saw the group in concert and details do matter?
This isn’t just a question that nags at popular music. What if the conductor who is closely identified with an orchestra and creating their distinctive sound moves on? Or even going back to the original idea, if there are 80 odd musicians who were part of the ensemble that created the signature sound of the orchestra, as each departs over the years, what is the tipping point where a new orchestra exists?
How much do any of these things matter? Well, in terms of popular music, there is potential for issues as members of groups die and the prospect of a reunion of the originals wanes. Not everyone can afford whatever preservation techniques The Rolling Stones are using.
Is it just the case that people need to move on and accept progress? Is this true in all scenarios? How do you know which scenario is a bridge too far in terms of faithfully and ethically providing what you are advertising?
This is a big question, and my feeling is that we are continually tripped up by finding only simple answers. The idea that what we look for in identity is something real out in the world makes perfect sense in only some circumstances. Its not a universal calling card, however, as you rightly point out. Having the same constituent parts gives some things their identity and others not. We make a mistake when we imagine identity can be approached only on a physical basis. This is not a question of doing natural science on cultural objects. It works for us in some cases but not all.
And because this is a powerful image, that identity is located ‘out there’ somewhere, in the things themselves, we are seduced into thinking that our attention need only focus on the objects in question. We imagine, for instance, that Art is some particular thing, and that occasional things qualify and others do not entirely as a matter of measuring up, having appropriate art qualities in their make up. We appeal to this objective seeming identity when we typically answer these questions. As if the artness were located in the things themselves.
What we lack in such cases is an awareness of the functional nature of identity, how things count *as* something *for* whom and *in* what circumstances. Identity, it turns out, is significantly conditional on criteria of who its supposed to matter for.
So if we can’t simply look at the things themselves to tell us ‘what’ they are, we need to uncover the other conditions where identity becomes manifest. Not everything that has an identity exemplifies nature being “carved at the joints”. Rather, there are practices of identifying some things this way at some times and other ways at other times. We are not talking about identity as a manifestation of the things themselves, but as what counts when and for whom. We can’t decide that in all cases by appealing to the objective nature of things themselves, but must instead refer to the conditional nature of who says what about which things.
Identity may have a huge basis in the solidity and permanence of how things in the world come to us, but it ends up often being less about the things than what we are inclined to do with them. Its not what external ‘things’ cause us to think as much as *what* we think about them.
This is a big question, and as long as we are mired in imagining some necessary objective reference we will be endlessly confused about how others can see things differently and why they would do so. Agreement only means that some things matter similarly for a number of people. And the source of that agreement is not a universality of external objective qualities but a harmony between people caring about similarly grouped things. It is the human practice of mattering that stands at the foundation. We *treat*them* the same, not because they necessarily ARE the same, but because to us in these conditions we *behave* as if they were.
It may turn out that the important question is not *why* we treat some things the same as the understanding that we do. The foundations of human behavior and culture in general is humans navigating the world. Natural science rightly looks to the world to carve up natural things at their joints, but the navigating part is infinitely more complex and human than that. We are obsessed with looking for natural causes, and one side effect is that we presume the things which interest us are all exclusively natural entities in themselves. We lose sight of the fact that human decisions and human values exhibit a non-necessity that has spawned many ways of doing things and have evolved over history. That, in fact, is the defining moment of contingency. And we had better make peace with that if we want to get clear about some specifically and uniquely human interests.