If Not a Label, Then What?

How are we going to make sense of behaviour if not by naming behaviour patterns? How do we avoid having to invent a personal psychological profile for every person on the planet?

What we need is a way to understand behaviour that can be applied to all behaviours, all people-making, and to me specifically or you specifically, to her, to him, to them. It is at this stage that we can appreciate the enormous contribution of agential realism.

The starting point.

People are a selection of possibilities. Of all the ways of being human, what is this person’s selection? What do they do? What do they not do?

Each person is a reality-generator. They are generating or perpetuating their own way of being in the world of possibilities. They have a way of being in the world. What they connect to, what they do, what meaning they give to what they do is who they are. They are a shape of connections to possible actions, possible meanings, possible audiences.

The process through which selections are made involve four elements ( elements is not really the right words because they are not discrete nor separate) but for the moment, four elements:

1-        access to possible actions or possible meanings,

2-       repetitions of the selected actions

3-       stabilising of patterns of actions and meaning

4-       agency shift to do different actions.

Selected actions and meanings are delineated by boundaries that either enable or constrain our connections to possibilities. Boundaries are the points of recognisability. Boundaries are the agreements between audience and person-performer. If they agree they are seeing the same actions and they agree on the meaning of the actions, then a boundary is created that functions to include some ways of being human and to exclude other ways of being human.  ‘I do this, I don’t do that. I eat eggs. I don’t eat meat’.

Each person, all of us is being made, consolidated into an identity by boundary exchanges. That is why the language that we speak and hear is so important in making us. Language is a portal to possible actions, making some actions more likely to happen, closing off other actions.

Labelling identity is replaced by analysis of the person-making process: access to possibilities, repetition, stability-making, agency shifts. 

Identity is not who you are but how you are, not what you are called but what you.