Modern life ascribes to us a multiplicity of subject positions and potential identities which hold the prospects for historically unparalleled human development, but they also represent a predicament that threatens fragmentation and psychosis – terrifying in their lack of personal, collective and moral boundaries. In this postmodern, ‘wide-open’ world our bodies are bereft of those spatial and temporal co-ordinates essential for historicity, for a consciousness of our own collective and personal past. ‘Not belonging’, a sense of unreality, isolation and being fundamentally ‘out of touch’ with the world become endemic in such a culture. The rent in our relation to the exterior world is matched by a disruption in our relation to our selves. our struggles for identity and a sense of personal coherence and intelligibility are centred on this threshold between interior and exterior, between self and other.

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Jonathan Rutherford, ‘A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference’, Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, 24