It was Erik Erikson’s Childhood of Society in 1950 that moved the idea of learner identity into the Mainstream. He brought constructs set out be Freud and applied them to the every day. There was a very Western American ideal to the construct of identity from a positivist light. But what if Identity is developed as a negation of truth?

Identity flickr photo by fotologic shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

Meanwhile Ardono was exploring non-identity as someone in Exile and trained the Marxist traditions Hegleian dialectics. Theodor Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School. Marxist and Jewish scholars who fled nazi Germany and settled at Columbia University.

Ardono would express a negative, rather than a positive view of Identity. Ardono was striving an idealist social universality in a world of American pragmatism that celebrated individualism. What resulted is a mismatch of Freudian construct of identity and historical materialism. The dialectical tradition of Kant and Hegel allowed Ardono to explore identity as something an object took on against social universalism. Identity became a non-identifier

For Ardono, who was writing about identity as protestors were calling for more Praxis and less lecture (Frierian Criticality), he said no identity is born pure and they emerged as the result of a negation. It was a reaction to a rneconciled, unemancipated concept.

This plays into discussions on social media. Are algorithmic identities real? Who controls them? What does it mean for adolescents when Identity work is a commodity? How do we encourage the use to own your identity through technology?