Abstrakt
Postmodernists have been often criticized (eg. Latour, Harman) that they favor the human interpretations of reality at the expense of material givennesses.
Yet many postmodern philosophers are not against materiality as such, they just claim that everything that is happening is always already interpreted by us. On the other hand, (all kinds of) languages are also material (Butler) so the deep chasm between reality and language dissolves.
The identities thus emerging from such thinking are discursively and materially pre-formed and at the same time subjectively per-formed. Here I intend to reformulate performative identities as the temporal results of momentary actants as seen by Bruno Latour (The Pasteurization of France, Science in Action).
Actants are small units of events captured in relational networks (be it something conceptual or conventionally material) in a concrete moment of space-time. Any compact durable entity is then an abstraction of relations performed at different levels (the abstraction is seeing today's jug as identical with yesterday's jug but also a plant not differentiating between one drop of water and another one).
Id-entity is therefore a set of abstractions of countless events - of which I am both a (quasi)object and a (quasi)subject.