It isn’t that early in the morning, yet I am finding myself struggling with concentration. The air is heavy with humidity and sound travels clearly. Today is the trials for Montreal’s annual Formula 1 races, and all I can hear are the cars zooming around and around – the track is a good 10km away from my house. In a way, it is kind of cool to be able to hear the cars speeding their way around the track – but it does nothing for one’s concentration. If that was not enough, I also get intermittent cries of delight from many children riding the roller coasters at La Ronde; Montreal’s amusement park – only a few km’s away as well.
Regardless of the sounds of summer, I am attempting to bring my brain back to earth after gobbling up a few fiction novels. I started reading Taylor’s Sources of the Self: the making of modern identity (something I think now that I should have read PRIOR to writing my thesis). Taylor writes in a clear, articulate and often entertaining way (something most theorists forget to do), yet I still find myself re-reading the same sentence three of four times. At this rate, I might be done reading the 521 fine print pages by summer’s end.
I am only at the introduction, but it is interesting to think about identity as something that is tied up in some sort of intrinsic morality. An odd thing to think about if we understand morals to be somewhat of a social construction – and identity, according to Bauman, as something that serves political interests (one of his stories of origin anyways). Taylor attempts to disentangle the idea of an intrinsic morality within the object of the human and the concept of morality based on culture and ideology. I am only at the beginning, but it is an interesting project so far.
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