This document discusses different perspectives on the nature of language and its relationship to identity. It summarizes the views of thinkers like Saussure, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Kelly on whether language operates through opposition of meanings or connection of meanings. It then argues that schizophrenia can be understood as a state where meanings are excessively connected rather than opposed. This reconciles the view of language as a "rhizome" of connections with the incoherence of schizophrenic speech. It concludes that if identity emerges from phenomenological experiences constructed through language, then schizophrenia represents a failure to construct identity through an inability to separate meanings.

1. Reflection paper.
Revitalization of scientific concept of identity?
By Leontyev Ruslan,
AUCA November 2016.
Rogers Brubaker (2000) in his famous article Beyond Identity generally argues that
identity is an umbrella term misused and misinterpreted and that perhaps does not exist at all
as scientific category or at least as a concept in positivist-essentialist paradigm.
“…“Identity,” we argue, tends to mean too much (when understood in a strong sense),
too little (when understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheer
ambiguity). We take stock of the conceptual and theoretical work “identity” is
supposed to do and suggest that this work might be done better by other terms, less
ambiguous, and unencumbered by the reifying connotations of “identity.”(Brubaker
2000 p1)”
However, based on the ideas of Lacan, Zizek, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, and others I
would like to revitalize the concept of identity and argue that identity does exist as scientific
category.
Common-sense dictates us the logic that there is no identity without language. Identity
exist first of all simply because any of us at any moment can speak put, identify himself or
herself as someone or somebody. It is in the forth of our ability to speak and produce such
sentences as I am this or I am that, identity does exist. However, scientifically one must
question if there is any logic, mechanism, propensities behind such sentences of self-
expression that could fall into the hands of scientific analysis. Perhaps, those sentences just
random, arbitrary, spurious amalgamation of language and a whim. Perhaps, there is a deeper

2. meaning behind those sentences. Therefore, it is from language that we should embark into
our intellectual journey to the essence of identity. We shall start by asking ourselves one of
the most fundamental questions that perplexed the minds of Derrida, Sassari, Deluze, Gurttari,
and Kelly: what language is.
Derrida (1997) in his idea of deconstruction examines differences between the
meanings and texts. He rebels against inconvenient binary property of language, which
divides the world between black and white not always leaving the possibility for the grey
color or possibility of any shades. The rule of language for Derrida is simple such that as long
as there is a friend, there is an enemy. To have a friend one must know enemy.
“The two concepts (friend/enemy) consequently intersect and ceaselessly change
places. They intertwine, as though they loved each other, all along a spiralled
hyperbole: the declared enemy, the true enemy, is a better friend than the friend. For
the enemy can hate or wage war on me in the name of friendship, for Friendships sake,
out of friendship for friendship (Derrida 1997, p.72)”
Derrida derives his ideas about binary language of opposite meanings from Saussure’s
logic. According to Saussure (1916), language has meaning simply because it is an aggregate
of opposite words: no linguistic meaning exists beyond the contrasting effect of words.
“In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally
implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are
only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier,
language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but
only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system (Saussure
1916 pp. 121-2)”.
The same idea belong to George Kelly, the father of cognitive psychology, who
believed that every person is a scientist in his own right, who discovers the world and

3. describes it through certain bipolar constructs (Kelly, 1969). Kelly’s repertory grid technique
is the test of how people use opposite adjectives to make personal constructs. How those
adjectives in the virtue of being opposite become hierarchical and how they help a human
being to deal with and predict reality. For Kelly language is bipolar and it is through
language’s bipolar qualities that we construct our understanding of the world around us make
sense from ourselves (Beail 1985). So both Kelly and Saussure advocate, although using
different scientific approaches and concepts, for bipolarity of meaning and for the simple fact
that language has meaning only in the forth of opposition of different words, and meanings.
What’s more Kelly takes the idea of meaning derived from bipolarity of language a little
further by implying that we construct our phenomenological experience and make sense out
of the world and ourselves in the forth of this fundamental property of a language that is
dichotomy (Beail 1985).
Fundamentally diferent approach belongs to Deleuze, Guattari (1987) with
introduction of their concept of rhizome. On the contrary to Sussaure’s language and Kelly’s
logic, rhizome, if used as a concept of language, is more about connection of meanings rather
than their opposition, bipolarity, and dichotomy.
“Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected
to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots
a point, fixes an order. The linguistic tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point
S and proceeds by dichotomy (Deleuze, Guattari 1987, p.7)”
Deluze and Guattari use the concept of rhizome to criticize Chomsky’s vision of language.
“Our criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract but, on the
contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine
that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to

4. collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field. A
rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections…(Deleuze, Guattari 1987, p.7)”
Judging by this quote we can understand that language is rhizome for Deleuze and Guattari.
We come to that strange situation where it is very difficult to define what language is.
On one hand, language is opposition of meanings, on the other hand it is rhizome, the
connection of every point (I understand point as a meaning) with every other point. Hence,
Saussure would say that Rhizome is meaningless simply because no units oppose each other.
Whereas, Deleuze, Guattari would comment on Saussure perhaps by saying that Saussure’s
understanding of language is structured hierarchy as one of Chomsky’s and not abstract
enough. So what is language? Is it oppositions of meanings or total connections of meanings?
It is from that implicit paradox between language as rhizome and Saussure’s language as a
structure of oppositions that I would like to further carry out my argument that identity exists.
To solve the discrepancy of how language can be both connection and opposition of
meanings we should examine the language of schizophrenic people. Deleuze and Guattari
(1987 p.25) say “rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things,
interbeing, intermezzo.” To better understand the concept of rhizome one must be familiar
with schizophrenic thinking. Judging by my own experience, none of schizophrenia suffering
people perceive their own speech as meaningless. Rather, it is the others, who do not see the
connections that schizophrenia suffering person is trying to communicate. I would like to
suggest that on the contrary to the prevailing paradigm that schizophrenic speech, a
meaningless word salad, is actually in fact both meaningful and meaningless in the same time.
It is meaningless in Saussure’s way and it is meaningful in Deleuze, Guattari’s way. I did my
internship volunteering for a day-care hospital for schizophrenic people and I come to
understand schizophrenia as the lost ability to disconnect meanings or oppose them and
acquired ability to connect words and reasons that usually not connected. Generally, people
not suffering from schizophrenia, may perceive schizophrenic language as meaningless in the

5. force of their usual habit to detect Saussure’s meaning. However, if Deleuze, Guattari
listened to schizophrenic speech, it would make a lot of sense for them because it is pure
manifestation of rhizome.
Another way to confirm a stronger connectedness between rhizomatic meanings and
schizophrenic language is the general schizophrenic mood, in which the book Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Deleuze & Guattari 1987) is written. It is in that book that the concept of
rhizome is first introduced. The title of book self-evidently promises that rhizome is somehow
connected with schizophrenia. The authors of the concept of rhizome experimented with
opium while writing the book. Opium is known to instigate schizophrenia-like altered state of
mind. The book itself is written in schizophrenic language, “God is a Lobster, or a double
pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata come at least in pairs, but in a different way each
stratum is double (it itself has several layers) (Deleuze & Guattari,1987 p.40)”. Further on
describing such quality of rhizome as multiplicity they say, “multiplicities are expressed by
psychosis and especially schizophrenia (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987 p 506)”
To further argument the connection between rhizome and schizophrenia we should
consider research by George Kelly (1969). When Kelly’s repertory grid test applied to
Schizophrenia suffering people it demonstrates that the patients loose their ability to create
bipolar constructs (McManus, 1992). That is they fail to see opposite meanings. This again
confirms our perception of schizophrenia as an illness of meaning connections and health
people as those who capable of cutting the meanings and deriving the meaning based on
bipolarity or opposition of meanings. If identity defined as a product of phenomenological
experiences and if personal contracts according to Kelly (1969) produce phenomenology of a
person, then I believe the failure to make those constructs is the failure to produce identities.
Coming back to identity concept, it is interesting to know that extreme perplexity
about one's own identity is a symptom of schizophrenia in DSM-IU-R (American Psychiatric
Association 1987, p. 189). Does the perplexity of identity in schizophrenic people represent

6. the same mechanism of rhizome formation? In other words, is identity of schizophrenic
people rhizomatic just like their language? The authors of the concept of rhizome appeal to
anti-singularity, multiplicity of rhizome which in my mind is connected with perplexity of
schizophrenic identity.
“Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a
substantive, "multiplicity," that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or
object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world. Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and
expose arborescent pseudomulti-plicities for what they are (Deluze and Gurtari 1987,
p.8)
Since we, healthy people, who do not suffer from schizophrenia are not Gods neither
Lobsters apparently nor all together, since we do not hold extreme perplexity about our own
identity, which is one of the prominent symptoms of schizoid mind, identity of a healthy
person is opposite to rhizome. It is unrhizomatic or anti-rhizomatic. It is structured. It has
opposite points. It is Saussure’s linguistics. It is the language of black and white, in which by
identifying yourself as a male you immediately identify yourself as not a female. By saying
that I am an adult, you automatically define yourself as not a child. This is the true essence of
identity to establish borders between I am and I am not through the dichotomy of language.
We can still support Brubaker’s (2000) point of view that identity does not exist.
However, in that case we must automatically assume that language is not rhizome and that
rhizome does not exist. Because identity and rhizome although opposite do not exist without
one another just like the sun and the moon. Just as there is no moonlight without sunlight,
there is no rhizome without identity. Moreover, if rhizome is schizophrenia and if identity is
opposite to rhizome then schizophrenia is opposite to identity. It is for the same reasons that if
schizophrenia exists then so does identity. Basically, if you believe that schizophrenia exists
you cannot deny that identity exist.

7. Other researchers (Estroff 1989) seem to agree on the fact that identity is opposite to
schizophrenia, “Schizophrenia is an I am illness— one that may overtake and redefine the
identity of the person (Estroff 1989, p1)”. This is also evident by general reports of lost sense
of identity from people suffering from schizophrenia
“Something has happened to me— I do not know what. All that was my former self
has crumbled and fallen together and a creature has emerged of whom I know nothing.
She is a stranger to me. ... She is not real—she is not I ... she is I—and because I still
have myself on my hands, even if I am a maniac, I must deal with me somehow
(Estroff, 1989 p1)”.
Still, reasonable doubt arises on the connection between language and identity. Apart
from common-sense experience that there is no identity without language, we may still
scientifically doubt the validity of such connection. We may for example agree that
schizophrenia is rhizomatic language but we may doubt that it is rhizome identity. To
argument the connection between both language and identity let’s turn our eyes to the very
first act of self-identification, which takes place in the mirror-phase. Lacan (1966) claims that
self-recognition in the mirror is essential for formation of further identities. However, there
are certain animals who can recognize themselves in the mirror but none of the animals have
identity. They do not have identities simply because mirror recognition is not the only process
of identifying oneself visually but also, I believe, linguistically. Again, we must hypothesize
that identity has a lot to do with language. It is not only the first act of self-recognition in the
mirror it is also connected with language acquisition, which starts developing during or right
after the mirror phase. Perhaps, self-recognition in the mirror is a linguistic act when child not
only recognizes himself in the mirror but does so with the help of language. The child learns
to recognize his or her name this means that child knows the borders between what I am and
what I am not through language. I am my name the child thinks. It is a lot like Saussure’s
linguistic meaning based on the opposition of words. The first act of identification is based on

8. Saussure’s linguistic meaning of first opposite words me and not me, my name versus not-
my-name category.
To support further this point of view let’s turn our eyes to Lacan’s (1966) suggestion
that schizophrenia is a regression to the stage prior to the phase of mirror recognition.
Research suggests that schizophrenic people perceive their body as fragmented rather than
integrated (Yip, 2015). Interestingly enough that both syndromes can be present during
schizophrenia that is rhizomatic talking and fragmented perception of one’s image. This again
shows us the interconnection between the mirror-phase self-recognition as a formation of first
identity and language.
Also, one must consider that the primary act of self-recognition in the mirror does not
happen because the child himself or herself approaches the mirror. Rather it is the adult, a
significant other, who brings the child to the mirror. The adult also does not bring the child to
the mirror in silence. The adult calls the name of the child while standing next to the mirror
and holding the kid. The acquisition of Saussure’s language happens by the child listening to
that adult who speaks Saussurian, the language of division between the opposite meanings,
the language that calls the name of the child and by doing so implicitly derives meaning from
the opposition between the child and non-child or child and the other world. In this sense the
mirror image is signifier and the child’s name is signified concept. The underlined meaning is
the distinction between me and not me.
“When Lacan, early in his career, formulated the outlines of his new social theory
based upon a rigorous ‘return to Freud’, he focused on the precariousness of the ego
and its imaginary lines of engagement with the world… As Lacan proclaims, the
mirror situates the self in a line of fiction . The self or ego is created as defensive
armour to support the psyche against its otherwise terrifying experience of
fragmentation and dread (Elliot, 2014 p.117)”.

9. Having provided enough connections between language and identity, language and
schizophrenia, schizophrenia and identity through various theories and empirical data with the
hope that I did manage to persuade my reader that identity exists, I would like now to
investigate how it is a scientific term.
Žižek (1994) makes an interestingly relevant claim on this account For Žižek (1994),
by the way, identity and ego are the same things. Žižek (1994) claims that the truth is not that
ego has some defense mechanisms; the truth is that ego itself is an aggregate amount of
defense mechanisms and nothing more. It is a sticking point. How is it possible to think of
yourself, your feelings, thoughts, conscious, intelligence, your objective reality as just a sum
of ego-defense mechanisms? What Žižek (1994) means is that ego-defense mechanisms deal
not so much with tensions between id and super-ego as much as the deal between the reality
and the ego. Since Žižek’s ideas are largely based on those of Lacan, and since for Lacan the
real is something that is beyond the articulation of language then ego-defense mechanisms
should define the borders between the real and the language. In other words, our
phenomenology ends where language ends “to be a subject is to experience the world as a
meaningful totality, and that language is crucial to this capability (The Criterion, 2010 p.6)” .
The real is not attainable with the help of words. Think, for example, of such dramatic events
as falling in love or loosing beloved one, death or birth of a child. Those are examples of the
real, things that are inexpressible by the means of language. Žižek (1994) claims that in
capitalistic society id and super-ego peacefully coexist so there is no need to imply the ego-
defense mechanisms to regulate their relationship what ego-defence mechonisms are used
instead is to regulate the borders between the real and the symbolic (Lacan’s terminology)
that is to protect ego from the encounter of linguistically inexpressible. Taking into
consideration Žižek’s ideas, Lacan’s (1966) famous “unconscious is structured like a
language” more precisely that is it speaks the symptoms through metaphoric language and

10. that psychosis is a linguistic dysfunction we can suppose that our phenomenology ends where
our language ends. However, the question is where does our language end? How to study it?
Our language ends where a person fails to produce free associations. The old good
Jung’s test of free-associations is one of the best techniques to study where the real interacts
with symbolic. In this test, a person is given word-stimuli with the task to produce free
associations. The researcher then measures the time the subject spend for producing
association. It is considered that those stimuli words whose response time was the longest
closely related with traumatic experience. What is more important is that Soviet psychologist
Alexander Luria (Sirotkina 2004) adopted initial Jungian experiment to measure the state of
affect. Luria added the test of fine motor skills to that. So, every time subject had to produce a
response in the form of free association to the stimuli word, he or she had to press the key.
Luria empirically proves that the time spend for response is positively correlated with
malfunction of fine motor skills. The disintegration of fine motor skills and the failure to
produce a free association for a longer time indicated the presence of the state of affect.
Back to schizophrenia, it is interesting to notice that abnormalities of speech,
malfunction of fine motor skills (like noticeable changes in handwriting), and the feelings of
deprived or lost identity are all very known symptoms of schizophrenia. Yet, it is too early to
assume that Jungian or Luria’s tests are appropriate scientific methods to study schizophrenia
and identity. Interestingly enough research shows that schizophrenia suffering people require
significantly bigger amount of time to respond on each of stimuli word. Hence, many exports
consider free association test as a valuable diagnostic tool of schizophrenia (Gordon 1982).
For the same reasons it could be used to measure and study identity.
To sum up identity is opposite to schizophrenia. If schizophrenia exists so does
identity. Identity must therefore be defined as how much a person is not schizophrenic or how
effectively he is able to build bipolar constructs of his phenomenological experience. Since
schizophrenia is measurable with such diagnostic tools as free assosiation test and Luria’s test

11. of fine motor skills then identity must be able to be measured by the same tools but with
different polarities. Hence, identity exists as a concept and while being defined and
measurable it is certainly a scientific concept. Brubaker was wrong.
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