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).
Yoshie -------------
This idea of when the individual as a subject or the subject as an individual appeared in historical periods comes up in art history in the form of finding names of individual artists. This is often associated with representational styles, but not always, and is further bound to whatever caste the artists belong to and how that caste fit into a more comprehensive cultural system. Another way to see the appearance is to look for portraiture, although this is a somewhat complex method since the existence of portraits is usually associated with the ruling classes and their specific histories.
If you are careful about the claims and assumptions, and limit yourself to just a recognition of the existence of the concepts without going overboard about it, you can see something of a dialogue about this problem of identity, individual, subject, society, and class in ancient Egyptian art. Their religious cosmology or their metaphysical system incorporated a variety of psyches, (akh, ka, ba, and name) and these had distinct qualities: one of which was something like a luminous presence of being (akh); another the individual subjectivity as an abstract being (ka); another was the personality or specifically unique configuration of that subjective being (ba?); and then one was the public personae embodied as the name--there was also a secrete name known only to the person and god (if forget which god--maybe Osiris or Ra?). These divisions of the non-corporeal were also the physical body and manifested as speech, breath, blood, semen, eyes, and other more substantial features. Before the body itself could be preserved in mummification, the Egyptians used sculptural effigies, but this tradition was later combined together with mummification as the elaborate masks and sarcophagous. So this identification of body with sculpture never quite disappeared, obviously. These were also class determined in the sense that you had to have someone carve or preserve you which means you had to command the wealth to have the work done.
Another interesting feature was that in the earliest periods (pyramids, Giza) the Pharaoh, court officials, and aristocracy were the only ones who would have their non-corporeal subjectivity saved if after an evaluation in the netherworld it was found to be worthy. Hence the pyramid complex had slightly later tract-house tombs for officialdom seeking the here after in the Old Kingdom. Some of the earliest quasi-literary text date from the close or transition at the end of the Old Kingdom, known as the First Intermediate Period (2200-2040 BC). Here is an excerpt from one text known as a man's confession or dispute with his ba:
To whom shall I speak today? Brothers are mean, The friends of today do not love. To whom shall I speak today? Hearts are greedy, Everyone robs his comrade's goods. (To whom shall I speak today?) Kindness has perished, Insolence assaults everyone. To whom shall I speak today? One is content with evil, Goodness is cast to the ground everywhere.
and later from the same text:
Death is before me today (Like) a sick man's recovery, Like going outdoors after confinement. .. Death is before my today Like a man's longing to see his home When he has spent many years in captivity.*
I think it is reasonable to assume that some of the figures from the smaller tombs in the pyramid complex were portraits made to stylistically incorporate some of the living features and thereby capture the subject (the ba?) as an individual. For an example, see the small carving of Seneb (a dwarf) with his wife and two children (6th Dynasty, or 2460-2200 BC) and Kaaper (both in the Louvre) in painted wood from the same period. Kaaper was an official who appears to be every bit as fat, pleasant tempered but in charge, as any better natured boss today.
I think you have to alter the idea that individual identity and subjectivity are somehow only connected to a specifically European, bourgeois, and capitalist ideology. I am not saying that the latter isn't exactly what we have done. What I am saying is that connection is not the only bound or defining characteristic. In other words, other societies and histories may create different configurations that result in very similar partitions to what we mean by identity, subject, individual, and class.
I also think that Butler, Foucault, and Derrida in their interrogations of what constitutes subjectivity, demonstrate a profound ignorance of history. Or, more generously then, they seem to have chosen to restrict their analysis in such a way as to isolate their work from the reach of many periods, and the respective evidence that poses serious questions about their assumptions.
Chuck Grimes
*from Grimal, _A History of Ancient Egypt_, 1992, p148, citing, Miriam
Lichtheim's _Ancient Egpytian Literature_, 1973.