Just as we have a sexual identity, a gender identity, religious identity, or national identity, why can’t we have an “intellectual identity”, one that is comprised of all the knowledge we have collected. Arguably we never stop learning. We go from the education system where we learn, to the workforce where we apply our knowledge. This is why I assure that education and career are highly intertwined, because is learning not hard work? School can be viewed as our first job in a sense that it is a child’s main purpose as money is for adults. Whether at work or at school there is one thing that everyone is being subjected to; The need to perform, the need to try, the environment in which you show who you are. Whether or not you realize it, you’re more familiar with your intellectual identity than you think. Imagine you are at work and a problem arises, how do you respond? You’re at school and have to write a paper, what do you write? The call to perform forces us to make decisions, and the you that makes those decisions is your intellectual identity. Your intellectual identity is your thought process. Stanford University describes it as, “the manner in which you relate to your surroundings”. It’s the idea that the work we do, as people, is coming from a soulful body that is an assemblage of an intersectional identity.
If you have ever seen the Apple TV show “Severance” you are familiar with its theme and commentary on work-life balance. In the show, characters’ memory and personality is split from their work self and their private life self. When they are at work they only know and can remember things that happen at work, creating their work identity which they call their “innie”. When they leave, they have no recollection of what happens during those work hours which creates a separate identity within themselves called their “outie”. While this is a dystopian tv drama, one thing it does for my argument is make a poignant example of how our work identities matter to our overall identity.
The current social construct of a career is to be in the same line of work for as long as your career lasts. However, incentivizing and proclaiming the mainstream idea of a career shuts out the possibility for nuanced thinking. Instead of thinking of a career as a rigid definition of something that you’re either successful in or not, with assemblage and intersectionality, I believe we can view our “career” as simply the time we spend using our intellectual identities. Kirsty Denyer and Tatiana Rowson have a similar construct of career in the sense that they put together the following: “Increasingly, careers are non-linear and individualized and driven by the individual rather than the organization. Thus, modern careers are more a “project of the self” than a concept linked to a specific place or way of working” (Denyer, Rowson).
In “I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess” Jasbir Puar says, “The theory of intersectionality argues that all identities are lived and experienced as intersectional- in such a way that identity categories themselves are cut through and unstable- and that all subjects are intersectional whether or not they recognize themselves as such” (Puar). We all have a constructed identity, one that did not come out of thin air and has roots back to our social categories such as race, sexuality, gender, class and religion. It is to say that our identities are molded by what we have been subjected to. Intersectionality acknowledges that people come from different places of subjectivity and shows that our subjectivities don’t come from just one category of our identity. Puar brings up a strong point when she says: “Distinct from a frame that privileges “difference within”, “difference from” produces difference as a contradiction rather than recognizing it as a perpetual and continuous process of splitting.” (Puar). I personally liked the idea of thinking of our differences as “difference within” because it implies that our differences are not wrong, but just a distinction of our identities. The basic framework of intersectionality is, “that different aspects of individuals’ identities are not independent of each other. Instead, they interact to create unique identities and experiences, which cannot be understood by analyzing each dimension separately or in isolation from their social and historical contexts” (Varsik, Gorochovskij).
Puar’s other big claim is that intersectionality works better when there is the theory of assemblage paired with it. The focus of assemblage is on “relations of force, connection, resonance, and patterning”, along with how these relations give rise to certain concepts in our lives (Puar). While assemblage is a hard theory to grasp, I came to understand it as my relationships between certain concepts in life are links, or “assemblages”, assembling my identity. How and why I view things from certain perspectives holds significance. She goes on to say, “assemblages foreground no constants but rather “variation to variation” and hence the event-ness of identity” (Puar). By now, I view intersectionality as the identification of a broad spectrum of categories, and assemblage as the strings that connect and tie together identity which comes from said categories. However, assemblage says that these “categories” are not concepts but rather “events, actions, and encounters between bodies” (Puar). This insinuates that our lives are the prominent correlator of our identities.
It is said that we spend one third of our lives working. Assemblage would believe that your work affects your identity, or that your intellectual identity is just one part of your larger identity. This idea gets talked about in Will Atkinson’s work on assemblage theory where he states, “Smaller-scale assemblages fit into or become segments in larger-scale assemblages” (Atkinson). Atkinson does the hard work of comparing assemblage theory to other social theories, notably Bourdieusian, to show how assemblage would and already does fit into our lives. He argues, “engaging with assemblage theory does prove fruitful for Bourdieusian social theory because specific insights from it allow us to push deeper on the interplay between fields, networks and the material world and the relational constitution of subjectivity than Bourdieu went” (Atkinson). I can apply this to the conversation of career because everyone has a different “interplay” of different fields and networks in the workforce. Different experiences create different products. To reiterate from earlier in the essay, these differences are within one’s own identity, and not from one “all-being” concept. You are different because you are unique, not because you are not something else.
Take my mom for example. The first portion of her life she worked very hard in the ski industry. Her first name starts with an ‘S’ and her last name is Lopes, so influenced by her work, she goes by ‘Slopes’. After the ski industry she went into taxes. While she didn’t like that line of work, and got out of it very quickly, she uses her skills she acquired to help low-income community members do their taxes for free. Currently, she is in education finance where she is running the financial side of a private school. She uses her connections and skills from her time in the ski industry to help with the students’ winter program. Now, while conventions and social structures may say that she has had three different careers, looking at this with an assemblage lens, she has had one career, one that is still developing. Everything she has learned in the past and all the jobs she has worked shape how she does her job now. Assemblage and intersectionality is able to redefine my mom not as a School Administrator, but as her own intellectual entity. While my mom is a strong example of how identity and career mesh, it is important to note that not everyone’s assemblages within their work life will be this strong, or positive. Some people can’t or don’t find purpose in their education or career and therefore the intersectionality between the two will be weak or negative. However, the important distinction is to take into consideration another side of our multifaceted identities.
Putting on my assemblage and intersectionality glasses, I see a world where working as a waitress for three years helps you get that teaching job or where being the only neuroscience major in a computer science class is an advantage. I think the benefit to viewing our careers as assemblages of our intersectional lifestyles is that no experience is seen as wasted and every event, job, shift we clock in for is seen as one small part to our much larger lives. This acts compelling because it doesn’t punish people for not being something they think they should be, and lets people’s individual intellectual prowess flourish.
Works Cited
- Atkinson, Will. “Field Theory and Assemblage Theory: Toward a Constructive Dialogue”, Sage Journals: Theory, Culture and Society. Volume 41 Issue 1, 2023.
- Denyer, Kirsty. Rowson, Tatiana S. “‘I’ve finally got my expression’: the anchoring roleof identity in changing from an organization-based career to a protean career path”, British Journal of Guidance & Counseling, 2022.
- Puar, Jasbir. “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess’: Becoming Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”, Literary Theory: An Anthology pg 1000-1013, 2017. Third Edition edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan.
- Stanford University: Academic Advising. “Advising Interactive Worksheet: Intellectual Identity”.
- Varsik Samo. Gorochovskij Julia. “Intersectionality in Education: Rationale and practices to address the needs of students’ intersecting identities”, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: Education Working Paper No. 302, 2023.
Sprockets and Springes 