The Construction of ‘the People’: Media Discourse as the Reference Point of Collective Identities

Abstract

The question of personal and collective identity is one of the densely discussed topics in Western social sciences. It is as old as the latter. Being one of the universal human needs (Bauman 1992), identity is a twofold phenomena: it is lived but it is also symbolically mediated. The former process is often seen as consequential: “what we call the subject is never given at the start” (Ricoeur 1991, 33), and it is precisely the order of the imaginary that constitutes and communicates personal and collective identities.
The essay aims at trying to describe national identity not in an essentialist way (what kind of identity it is), but from an anti-essentialist stand (what kind of identity it is said to be). To put it differently, it is crucial to consider the idea of national identity not as merely representational or descriptive, but rather as performative, thus opening a possibility to assess its ideological effects. Following Laclau’s elaborations on populism as a form of political logic that leads to emerging “people” as a political subject, the current essay explores the aspects of discursive identity-building processes in modern Belarus in order to access its ideological implications and offer a possible mode of narrating the Belarusian identity, in as much as, as I try to show, the only mode of present-time Belarusian identity is narrative identity - the way Belarusians are narrated and narrate themselves.