There is an interesting article by Peter Stallybrass. "Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text." _Cultural Studies_. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. NY + London: Routledge, 1992: 593-610. This article should shed light on the genealogy of 'identity' in that auguably the most important 'identity' to be constructed under capitalism is that of an 'individual.'
First of all, Stallybrass sets Althusser's comment on interpellation the right side up: "In a famous passage of what has been his most influential essay, Louis Althusser...writes: 'Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects'.... Yet Althusser's synchronic formulation masks a curious diachronic reversal. It would surely be more exact to say that within a capitalist mode of production, ideology interpellated, not the individual as a subject, but the _subject_ as an _individual_" (593).
Taking a cue from Raymond Williams's _Keywords_, Stallybrass goes on to trace the genealogy of an 'individual.' What is intriguing is that the first OED-recorded use of 'individual' (1425) appeared in the following statement: "to the glorie of the hye and indyvyduall Trynyte" (594). Stallybrass notes: "In this context, individual suggests not merely indivisibility but indivisibility among what one would normally assume, outside a theological context, to be different elements. 'Individual' here implies a relation between parts, even though that relation is such that the division into parts is impossible" (594).
The second use of the term 'individual' that OED records is Hooker's use of the adverb 'individually' in 1597. Again, the passage refers to the Trinity (and thus an indivisible relation between parts).
Then, in the 17th c., what Stallybrass calls "an extraordinary explosion of the term" occurs, and the main definitions of the term also emerge in this century. "The only important new developments of the term [after the 17th c.] given in the dictionary are 'individualism' (1835), 'individualist' (1840), 'individualistic' (1974)" (594).
Stallybrass (while duly taking note of the limitations of OED) summarizes thus: "first, the concept is an extremely specialized theological one prior to the seventeenth century; second, during the course of the seventeenth century, the meanings of the concept seem to be _inverted_: from meaning an indistinguishable relation between parts, the 'individual' comes to signify the separation of the part from the whole and indeed, the possibility of contemplating a person in and of her or him self" (594). Stallybrass reads this history as "less temporal one of gradual evolution than an active struggle over definition," further arguing that "with the exception of the specifically Trinitarian use of the term, the uses of 'individual' suggesting indivisibility and those suggesting divisibility' emerge _together_" (594-5). Stallybrass gives us two examples of opposite meanings emerging syncronously: "'Peace...is the very supporter of Individualls, Families, Churches, Commonwealths'" from 1641; and "the first use of the phrase 'individual society' (i.e. a society that is indivisible)" from Milton's 1645 divorce tract" (595).
In the rest of the article, Stallybrass gives us a fascinating history of the aforementioned "active struggles" between the two opposite meanings (divisible vs. indivisible), fought through the politics of authorship (the idea of originality constructed through the erasure of collaboration, of theatrical contexts of production, etc.), textual emendation (privileging meanings consonant with the idea of individualism, erasing the non-existence of the 'individual word' prior to orthographic standardization, etc.), and so on. Stallybrass writes that "precisely those areas where a modern editor attempts to establish the elementary units of textual organization--the individual author, the individual word--the Renaissance dramatic text is most resistant" (601).
Last but not the least, Stallybrass calls attention to the gendered meanings of the term 'individual': "...it is precisely in this sense of the indivisibility of the sexes that the word 'individual' recurs throughout the seventeenth century, at the same time as the word is coming to be defined in the opposite sense of a separate element" (602).
In _The English Dictionarie_ (1623), Henry cockerham defines "individual"
as "not to be parted, as man and wife," but it is in Milton that this sense
of individual as the indivisible relation between man and woman finds its
apotheosis. When Eve flees from Adam, he says:
to give thee being I lent
Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart
Substantial Life, to have thee by my side
Henceforth an _individual_ solace dear. (IV. 483-486)
(Stallybrass 602-3)
This points to the crucial contradiction of the bourgeois ideology of individualism: while everybody is interpellated as 'individual' by this ideology, no woman is allowed to act as if she were an 'individual.' This paradox becomes the most apparent in the Right's war against women's right to abortion. In this sense, struggles over the meanings of the 'individual' have continued to the present.
Yoshie