The veil and the search for the self: From identity politics to cultural expression

Introduction

The excerpt above was taken from an interview with a young woman of Turkish heritage, born and raised in the Netherlands. ¹ I will return to it below, as a counterpoint to some of the rich discursive material offered by Wagner, Sen, Permanadeli, and Howarth (2012) in their attempt to show how the veil serves in the construction of Muslim women's identity. Few cultural expressions in our day and age have caused more controversy than the veil or headscarf (hijab) worn by Muslim women. Although going back to times before the advent of Islam and never mentioned as such in the Koran, it has historically come to be associated with the Muslim ideal of modesty and with the seclusion of women from men in the public sphere. Today, debates about the veil are particularly related to the visibility of Muslim women either in societies with a non-Muslim majority (like Western societies, or India) or in secular countries with a Muslim majority (e.g. Turkey). In this commentary, however, I want to focus not so much on the contested meanings of the veil as such, but on the veil as a paradigm case for a cultural psychology of human agency.

Wagner et al. (2012) found that whereas veiling for women in a Muslim majority country like Indonesia takes on rather uncontroversial meanings related to convenience, fashion and modesty, Muslim minority women in India display a rather diverse range of strategies with regards to the veil, involving reasons varying from religious motives to the affirmation of cultural identity and they suggest that strategies of Muslim minority women in Western societies may be very similar. The dominant discourse in Western society has cast the veil as a symbol of women's oppression by a patriarchal culture or a fundamentalist religion. Wagner et al. attempt to show that for Muslim minority women, it also serves as a means of resistance and opposition against endemic stereotypes and discrimination.

Although the distinction between majority and minority cultures is a useful one, the situation for Muslim minority women in Western society may in important ways not be as similar to that in India as Wagner et al. suggest. Historically, India is one of the most multicultural societies in the world, but unlike the societies of Western Europe and immigrant nations like Canada and Australia, India has never adopted a policy of multiculturalism. After Canada and Australia in the early 1970s many countries in Western Europe adopted multicultural policies and although recent political shifts to the right and concerns with ‘home grown terrorism’ have contributed to a reversal of those policies, the ideology of multiculturalism and its attending notions of ‘identity politics’ and the ‘politics of recognition’ do still inform the neo-liberal political debate. However, what informs that debate as well are concerns with the secular nature of public life. European countries have responded differently to the ‘headscarf controversy’ that started in France over a decade ago. France has since banned all ostentatiously religious symbols from public life and public schools, the Netherlands and Germany allow women to publicly wear the headscarf as long as they don't represent state authority and Germany has in addition banned the headscarf for teachers in public schools (Korteweg & Yardakul, 2014). As the controversy continues, Western intellectuals and feminist thinkers have made it into a prime arena for identity politics and have debated whether to consider the scarf as a tool for women's oppression or a symbol of freedom of expression (for some excellent discussions, see Bracke & Fadil, 2012; Fadil, 2011; Mahmood, 2005; Scott, 2007). All this forms the backdrop for the lives of actual women, whose experience, agency and voices easily get drowned out by the clamor of more ideological debates.

Wagner et al. (2012) are interested in allowing those women a voice. What interests me in this commentary is what kind of cultural psychology is implied in their account of minority Muslim women's reasons to wear the veil or headscarf. More in particular, my interest is in the conception of agency that lies at the heart of this cultural psychology. The language Wagner et al. use shows that their understanding of women's agency is not uncontentious. They state, for instance, that Muslim minority women are ‘forced’ into constructing their cultural identity in ways that exaggerate their group belonging and difference from the broader society and offer that this may be motivated either by ‘falling back’ on religious resources, or by using ‘ethnic markers to oppose religious prejudice’. By simultaneously evoking the language of force and opposition, Wagner et al. raise a precarious issue regarding to possibilities of agency in light of often contradictory normative demands and regarding cultural psychology's ability to theorize and conceptualize those possibilities. My question is what kind of psychological language would be most suited to address issues of agency and normativity and how this language can be brought to bear on the case of the female veil or headscarf.

Cultural psychology and agency

Wolfgang Wagner (e.g. Wagner, 1996, 1998, Wagner & Hayes, 2005) has been a leading and productive representative of social representation theory in psychology and his work on the concerted nature of human action has prompted us in earlier work to critically compare the social representation approach to our own enactive approach, which conceives of meaning as ‘enacted’ rather than represented and of human action as consensually coordinated rather than shared (Verheggen & Baerveldt, 2007; for a debate, see further Chryssides et al., 2009; Daanen, 2009; Verheggen & Baerveldt, 2012). Notwithstanding the differences, our common aim is the development of a genuinely cultural and historical psychology that allows us to understand human action and expression as inextricably bound up with a meaningful world. Ever since the reinvention of cultural psychology in the mid 1980s, there have been different articulations of the relation between ‘culture’ and ‘self’, ‘mind’ or ‘psyche’. Shweder (1991), for example has talked about the way culture and psyche ‘dynamically, dialectically and jointly make each other up’ (p. 73) and others have used Vygotsky's work to make a similarly dialectical argument for the mutually constitutive relation of ‘culture’ and ‘self’ (see Valsiner, 2000, p. 40 ff. for a discussion of Vygotsky's dialectical synthesis). There is something misleading, however, in accounts that attribute to ‘culture’ some kind of agency on a par with the agency of human actors. To say that ‘culture’ constitutes anything, jointly or not, is to mystify the genetic processes by which the possibility for agency is produced (Baerveldt, 2012, 2015). We have argued instead that as fully embodied human agents we are not in relation to ‘culture’, dialectically or otherwise, but to other embodied agents in histories of attuned or consensually coordinated conduct that recursively leads to new ‘closed’ or non-reducible operational domains like language, dance, music and mathematics, each with its own normativity and hence with its own possibilities for skilful or agentic conduct (Baerveldt, 2015; Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999, 2012). The notion of culture may have descriptive value, but it has as such has no explanatory value for human conduct (Voestermans & Verheggen, 2013).

All this is of course not to say that culture is merely a word for the benign interplay of free-floating subjects or individuals. Scholars following Foucault have pointed out that the process of subject formation or subjectivation is always double edged. Speaking of power rather than culture, Foucault has shown that the very operations of power that produce the ‘subject’ through subordination simultaneously produce possibilities for agency (Foucault, 1977, 1983, 1988). But power, on Foucault's account, does not reside anywhere, is not a positive force or entity that acts or constitutes. Power is the name for the complex strategical situations arising from specific individuals and groups opposing each other (Foucault, 1980, p. 93; also see Dreyfus, 1996, p. 3). Power, like ‘culture’ is neither an entity, nor an agent, but the total way in which our practices get coordinated and governed such that they produce particular possibilities for agency. In our own work (e.g. Baerveldt, 2015; Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999, 2012; Voestermans & Verheggen, 2013), we have used terms like ‘consensual coordination’ and ‘attunement’ in order to understand what we have elsewhere called ‘the paradox of cultural psychology’: especially when people believe they are being ‘themselves’, or that they are acting on the basis of their own authentic experience, we can observe their behaviour to be culturally patterned (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999). Culture is not a force or agent that affects us from the outside. Rather, it refers to the complex orchestration of affects, wills and desires that structures the possibilities for meaningful action. Culture is precisely that what we experience to be natural. Foucault's temperament lets him speak rather in the language of a hermeneutics of suspicion. Yet, for him, too, power can only be exercised over free subjects and the pertinent question is precisely how such subjects are produced in a way that makes only certain courses of action possible or intelligible.

If we are to give a genuinely cultural psychological account of an expression like the veil, I believe we should keep the above admonitions regarding culture in mind, while at the same time eschewing the traditional social psychological language of ‘social identity’, ‘prejudice’ and ‘stereotyping’ with its roots in what basically remains an individualist social psychology. Wagner's language of social representations in earlier work is more helpful here, as it allows us to conceive of the veil as ‘a social object within the group's system of common sense and in the course of interactions in which actors sharing a representation engage’ (Wagner, 1998, p. 307). In line with our earlier critique of social representation theory, I propose to consider the veil instead as a paradigm case for a cultural psychology of agency or meaningful expression gained through a language of affect, self-fashioning, cultivation, training and discipline. Culture, broadly speaking, refers then to the idea that through a particular cultivation and orchestration of affect people are able to maintain a ‘way of life’, a dynamic conglomerate of normative practices that exist only because people ‘feel’, affectively and viscerally, bound to certain ways of getting it right. To express one's culture is not primarily to make a statement about one's group belonging, but to participate in a particular way of life, largely as a matter of course. Of course, one might argue, finding oneself at odds with the way of life of a cultural majority, or finding oneself caught between the demands of two different cultures, may throw what was once obvious and taken-for-granted in relief and demand a more deliberate strategy of identity construction and discursive accounting. The question I want to raise, however, is whether the juxtaposition of different ‘cultures’ would justify relegating culture to the status of mere ‘symbolic resources’ (for a discussion of the use of symbolic resources, see Zittoun et al., 2003; Hale & Abreu, 2010), ‘devices’, ‘discursive repertoires’ (Potter & Wetherell, 1987) or ‘semiotic means’, all in the service of an unreflected agent and its need to construct an identity. What kind of agent would be able to take up and use such cultural resources? And what kind of agency would be implied by a psychology that defines the construction of identity in terms of cultural ‘pressures’ and ‘resistance’ against stereotyping? My hope is that a reflection on those questions will help make room for a cultural psychology of human agency and sense making liberated from the presuppositions of a secular neo-liberal discourse that still defines culture in external relation to moral agents.

Identity work or cultural expression?

It is an ironic feature of many Western critical discourses that they are still premised on the model of alterity/identity thinking, such that it seems that the only way in which one can be oneself is by having an identity – ethnic, religious or otherwise – that can be held up in the arena of public discourse and to resist the dominant discourses that cast who one is in external or alienating terms. Wagner et al., too, argue that ‘[i]dentity is always produced through and against the views of others, and so a minority's identity construction is always a response to how they have been stereotyped by the majority’ (Wagner et al., 2012, p. 524; for another account of identity construction among Muslim women in a migratory context, see Skandrani et al., 2011). But is the language of identity politics truly the one best suited to understanding the desires, affects and motives of women who choose to wear the veil or headscarf? Is, as Mahmood (2001) has wondered, resistance and opposition to either traditional or modern discourses the only form of agency for ‘minority’ women choosing to wear the veil or headscarf, or is there a way to conceptualize their agency in terms of the capacities for action enabled by specific histories of self-fashioning and self-cultivation not necessarily modelled on the alterity/identity dichotomy? Can the personhood and moral agency of those women be understood in terms other than the claim for identity?

Whether framed from a traditional social psychological point of view or from a perspective that privileges the strategic and rhetorical nature of language, the language of identity, positioning and resistance still implies a subject that is defined outside the normative order of power. A critical cultural psychology cannot simply proceed from a perspective that endows human agents with semiotic powers and semiotic means without interrogating the particular configurations of affect, desire and motivation that help constitute viable worlds and particular opportunities for agency. Yet, neither can agency any longer be understood on the model of a sovereign subject strategically positioning herself in order to construct and uphold an ‘identity’. Discursive psychologists (e.g. Edwards, 1997; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter & Wetherell, 1987) have challenged the mentalist presuppositions of psychology by changing their focus to the management of stakes and interests in the interpersonal discursive realm. However, as much as this reorientation may have served in advancing an intrinsically social psychology of meaningful action, discursive psychology, for fear of sliding back in essentialism or psychologism, had to remain mute with regards to what might be considered key questions for any genuinely psychological account of human action. Why, for instance, do people so often act in ways that do not seem to be serving their interests, why do they often remain rather inarticulate with regards to things that are most important to them and how do they make sense of themselves and others in domains and situations that may not be merely rhetorical or positional in nature? Displays of love, admiration and commitment, expressive acts like winks, shrugs or subtle movements of the eyes and even speech acts like apologizing or promising are not merely ways of social positioning and serving strategical aims. They serve as much in the authentication, validation and orchestration of feelings that helps to make social or relational stuff ‘real’ (Baerveldt & Voestermans, 2005). The ring, the flowers, the tender gesture, the glance, as well the words ‘I’m sorry’, or ‘I promise’ are part of a social or moral ontology by virtue of which normative or cultural ‘things’ can be real, can be the kinds of things they are. If we live in a world in which social or ethnic identities can be real, rather than taking these realities for granted, the critical question has to be what ways of life, what particular histories of consensually coordinated actions and what particular orchestrations of affect allow certain kinds of ‘subjects’, ‘objects’ and relations to show up with the particular compelling normative implications they have. The female veil and headscarf are a point in case, as their normative or moral significance lies not just in the ‘reasons’ women give if asked to render a discursive account of it, nor in the complex discourses that constitute the global arena of identity politics, but in the way the scarf or veil is part of and gives expression to a way of life.

Culture as embodiment

The allusive status of the term ‘culture’ is somewhat reminiscent of the term ’being’ in the work of Heidegger (1962), or ‘power’ in that of Foucault (1977, 1983). Heidegger attempted to correct the mistake of metaphysics to attribute the existence and intelligibility of ordinary ‘beings’ to a supreme Being at their source. Heidegger, instead, understood being as a clearing, or that what allows anything – a thing, an idea – to show itself or to be ‘unconcealed’. Being is ‘that on the basis of which “beings” are already understood’. It is the entire coordination of background practices that allows ‘things’ to show up or to be intelligible in the first place, before any act of intellectual interpretation. In the terms of Hubert Dreyfus ‘things show up in the light of our understanding of being’ (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 163). Following Heidegger and Foucault in this regard, we can now also strip culture of its metaphysical status and recognize that culture does neither explain nor mediate human activity. If meaningful human activity involves the use of signs, those signs cannot account for the meaning of those activities. Rather, signs signify precisely because of the exact role they play in consensual practice. Semiotic accounts of meaningful action often engage in a kind of ontological smuggling, by accounting for meaningful action in terms of already meaningful semiotic devices. They relegate cultural expressions to the status of symbolic resources, thus smuggling in as well a utilitarian agent whose agency remains unreflected.

The enactive account we have proposed elsewhere (e.g. Baerveldt, 2015; Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999, 2012; Voestermans & Verheggen, 2013) proceeds genetically, by focusing on the one hand on the ways in which our ‘natural’ capacities for affect and expression are brought into accordance with consensually coordinated community practices and on the other on the embodied normative dispositions or competences that are acquired through cultural training. Cultural training implies repetitive practice in a context of normative correction and such repetition implies customs and rituals. Indeed, as Wittgenstein has convincingly demonstrated, only repetitive community practice can provide the kind of relative stability by virtue of which judgements of normative sameness can be made (Wittgenstein, 1974/1958, 1978/1956; also see Baerveldt & Verheggen, 2012). A joke, an offence, a display of love, honour or respect can be produced and recognized as such not because ‘culture’ or ‘language’ provides us with the conceptual tools to classify them accordingly, but because they are already expressed and understood within our actual practice of living. Semiotic action, that is, action involving the use of signs and symbols requires both normative stage setting and normative skills, each of which cannot be accounted for in terms of the meaning of signs themselves. It requires an account that is genuinely historical and genetic. Psychologically speaking, the key term here needs to be training and not mediation.

What are acquired in cultural training are not social representations or identities, but an entire deeply embodied way of being disposed to the world. Embodied, here, means that it involves skills or bodily competences and a sense for ‘getting it right’ that cannot be captured in the generalized terms of semiotic systems, since they belong to this particular body that has gone through this particular history of training. Polanyi (1958) has talked in this regard about tacit knowledge and personal knowledge and has shown that this kind of knowledge cannot be transferred by more formal significatory means, but requires each cultural apprentice to go through a unique history of training or ‘indwelling’. So how can this radical singularity be reconciled, then, with the idea of culture as a more general order? It is a common misconception that ‘culture’, because it involves some kind of ‘shared’ understanding of the world, must by necessity involve the mediation of our actions by a general sign system. Mediation has become a key concept in present-day cultural psychology and is at the core of a variety of semiotic cultural psychological accounts (see Fernyhough, 2008; Mertz & Parmentier, 1985). On such accounts, only by possessing mediational means that have become abstracted or ‘distanced’ from the idiosyncrasies of actual lives would we be able to have a world or an understanding in common (e.g. Valsiner, 2005). Signs provide the kind of generality that lifts us out of the immediacy of our own particular situation, into the shared symbolic order of culture.

The enactive account we are proposing (e.g. Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999, 2012) stays much closer to Heidegger in this regard, who considered the human being or Dasein to be irremediably concrete and finite. On our account, to participate in culture, or to have a world in common, is not to share an abstract or generalized semiotic system, but to be historically attuned to other such concrete beings in an embodied way (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999, 2012; Verheggen & Baerveldt, 2007; Voestermans & Verheggen, 2013). Indeed, this attunement is a genetic accomplishment and needs to be accounted for in terms of particular traditions and particular histories of cultural training and self-cultivation. The accord or discord we have with other human beings does not rely on the presence or absence of shared mental content, or shared semiotic systems, but on the way we have or have not become attuned to one another, by participating in a certain expressive, affective, normative style of being, a complex coordinated dance with no predesigned plan. Only in light of the orchestrated, relatively harmonious lives we already live can we attempt to acquire an abstract or generalized perspective, as if from the outside and pretend that the abstractions thus acquired serve as conditions for our common understanding. For Heidegger (1962), any escape into the sphere of the universal is a fall into the inauthenticity of everyday averageness, ‘what everyone does’, or ‘das Man’. On our own interpretation, the inauthenticity Heidegger spoke of is not so much a consequence of our immersion in the common order of ‘culture’, but of our self-conscious and self-serving conviction that the contingencies of our own particular lives represent universal goods. Precisely the pseudo-explicitness and complacency of discursive claims and statements cover up something more authentic, something allowed to reveal itself best if shown rather than stated. Inauthenticity results not from the practical agreements we live, but from our conviction that we can propositionally spell out what we have in common and what should guide our lives.

From accounting to embodied style

It is not our task as cultural psychologists to determine whether cultural expressions are authentic or not. Whether an outsider might conceive of the female veil as a ‘symbol’ of either subjugation or resistance, the question whether it is a genuine expression of self or an ‘exaggeration of group belonging’ motivated by ‘falling back on religious resources’ or of ‘using ethnic markers to overtly oppose endemic prejudice’ (Wagner et al., 2012) is a moral or ideological and not a psychological one. From our perspective, the cultural psychological significance of the veil or headscarf lies not so much in the discursive reasons that supposedly motivate it, but in the way they are part of an entire expressive style, of which the discursive account is only a minor part. In the realm of ‘reasons’ and ‘accounts’ we often cannot but be struck by the contradictory and tautological nature of what is expressed. The young woman in the excerpt at the beginning of this commentary gives ‘reasons’ for wearing the scarf, regarding the importance of preserving one's beauty for one man. Those reasons then turn out not to be the reasons that actually led to her choice, but reasons that by being discovered and recognized as ‘beautiful’ and ‘logical’ almost retroactively give sense to her previous decision to start on the course that led to wearing the scarf. Likewise, while this young woman first indicates that she wanted to start wearing the scarf ‘because it's in the Koran’, she then says that she wanted to do it ‘not just because it said so in the Koran’, but because there is a good reason for it. What is particularly striking about the account, however, is the temporal or sequential nature of the reasons and actions presented. More than just presenting a causal sequence, the temporal yet circular nature of the account testifies to the fact that religious virtue is not just something that motivates certain choices or actions in a linear way, but something that entails the inculcation of entire dispositions through a progressive training of body, emotions and reason (Mahmood, 2001, p. 212). Wearing the headscarf for this woman does not just follow logically and atemporally from initial reasons, but is the consequence of a genetic logic in which each new practice helps to create the dispositions for taking the next step: ‘and at one stage, yeah wearing the headscarf was the last thing I did, I first started praying five times a day, then his and that, and at a certain moment I thought (…)’. The scarf is being presented as ‘the last thing I did’ and if this final step seems ‘logical’ then, this is not because of the particular argumentative or rhetorical structure of her account, but because this woman has at that point already acquired an entire way of being disposed to the world as a consequence of arranging her life in a particular way. Faced with the many contradictory demands of a polyphonic society, rather than merely finding reasons or arguments, she has cultivated in herself the dispositions that belong to a virtuous life and that allow certain things to show up as real and compelling for her.

Aristotle already recognized that virtue cannot just be a matter of rational choice, but requires the right bodily dispositions or hexis, which can – seemingly paradoxically – only be acquired by doing virtuous things: ‘Like activities produce like dispositions’ (Aristotle, 2004, p. 92). In order to acquire mastery in playing a musical instrument, we must actually play it and so must we in order to become virtuous perform virtuous deeds. A paradox only arises if we fail to see that Aristotle is basically presenting a genetic argument here, in which a certain way or ‘style’ of being can only be understood in terms of the particular way in which this style is acquired. Implicit here is a model of agency that is far more sophisticated than that of the strategical, calculating subject that constructs its own reasons and which ironically still informs many forms of discursive thinking and theories of identity. Both traditional cognitive psychology and discursive psychology have failed to acknowledge anything in the way of bodily dispositions and the genetic ‘logic’ that allows us to understand how such dispositions are both acquired and expressed. They have remained ahistorical, non-developmental and disembodied. The strategic user of language is much like the homunculus that has haunted cognitive science, a sui generis entity without body and without history. Only a genuinely genetic account of agency can escape the essentialism that discursive thinking was so desperate to escape and that is a central concern in Wagner's work as well (e.g. Wagner, Holz, & Kashima, 2009), by recognizing that the possession and the acquisition of a skilful disposition are formally indistinguishable. They are repetitive or temporally extended demonstrations of ‘proper’ behaviour in a context of normative correction. Agency ensues not from sovereign subjects, but from trained and disciplined bodies.

Conclusion: Toward a cultural psychology of agency and depth

If anything, cultural psychologists are driven by a concern with the actions and expressions of people in the context of their real everyday lives. The work of Wagner, Sen, Permanadeli and Howarth is exemplary in this regard and if it creates room for critique, this is only because it is asking real questions and deals with the accounts of real people. Researchers interested in actual lives have come to rely heavily on ‘accounts’, as accounts seem to be the means par excellence for people to make sense of their own lives. The idea that it is our task, as social scientists, to study how people make sense of their own lives was perhaps articulated most clearly by Garfinkel (1967), who defined accountability as the often implicit expectation that actors ‘design’ their actions in such a way that their sense is immediately obvious, or at least in principle explicable. Particularly for Muslim minority women, the question why they choose to wear a veil or headscarf is a pertinent question. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the accounts they give if asked this question exhaust the meaning of wearing the veil or scarf. Accounts neither constitute straightforward reasons for people's actions and expressions nor are they merely after-the-fact explanations for the sake of identity work. Instead, they are part of an entire expressive style that involves dress, attire, make up, ways of speaking and acting and indeed, in this case, the veil or headscarf itself, all of which only in their generative juxtaposition express a depth of meaning that would be flattened by any purely discursive account. Style is expressive both of ways of life and of modes of selfhood. It is expressive not in its propositional clarity, but in its polysemic ambiguity. This ambiguity means that it remains open to reinterpretation and that no single expressive feature – whether it be discursive or not – can constitute an expression's entire or ultimate meaning. The young women in our own study referred to above choose to cover their hair, but also wear tight jeans and make up their eyes. They seek to articulate reasons that ‘make sense’ yet for choices already made. The headscarfs they wear are highly fashionable, yet allow them to remain respectable and virtuous in the eyes of their parents and community while simultaneously serving as typical modern or postmodern identity markers (for a discussion of identity markers and their relation to identity as a whole, see Watzlawik, 2012). They insist on their commitment to Islam, but reject any interpretation of the scarf as a symbol of women's subjugation, casting the historical subordinate position of women as part of their ‘culture’ rather than their religion. They quote or paraphrase the Koran, but often to substantiate emancipatory aims and claims. In all this there is no final reason, no ultimate significance, but neither is there merely a contradictory inarticulate mess. Their entire expressive style, in all its ambiguity and seeming contradiction, creates for those women the space of an agency that is not just defined in terms of society's demand for conformity or adequate reasons. It provides their lives with expressive depth and prevents them from being flattened out on the Procrustes bed of other people's understanding.