December 27, 2006: Identity Meets the Cluetrain Manifesto

What is Hecuba to you or you to Hecuba? This injunction (shameless appropriated from Shakespeare's Hamlet) applies not only to actors but to all of us in the “roles” we play (our “presentation of self,” as Goffman called it) in everyday life. However, there is also a grander scheme of things that I introduced some time ago. This involves what I feel is the most important lesson from Plato’s “Theaetetus” dialogue. This is that, while none of the four definitions of knowledge considered can survive Socrates' critical examination, Socrates does demonstrate how the concept of knowledge is tightly coupled to three other key concepts: memory, being, and description (λόγος).

I would now like to pick up where my last discussion left off and examine the concept of “Being.” I would argue that this concept needs to be sorted into the being of objects and the being of subjects, i.e., the agents who engage with objects; and this latter class of being has to do with identity. In other words any inquiry into the nature of identity involves pulling at a thread that is tightly woven to many other critical threads, including the thread of knowledge itself!

These couplings have been particularly well appreciated by George Herbert Mead, particularly in his exploration of the concept of symbolic interactionism. I like to say that the motto of symbolic interactionism is: “No perception without personal interaction.” For my money this is the underlying premise without which the assertion that “markets are conversations” cannot make any sense. Indeed, it is also the premise behind Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which argues that “communicative action” (as Habermas defines it) is the fundamental prerequisite for understanding. Since it seems valid to assume that markets can only operate effectively within a context of understanding between buyers and sellers, Habermas’ theory ultimately explains why markets are conversations; but I am afraid that this kind of foundational thinking has gotten lost amid the 95 theses of the Cluetrain manifesto!