“Unter einen Hut bringen” – literally, to bring under one hat – names a modern itch: the urge to reconcile our many roles and compress contradictions into one identity. We hustle between incompatible scenes of life and wish for a single through-line that can travel with us. The wager here is that uniformity itself can be a concept, less a solution than a probe into how identity is produced, timed, and priced. What follows is a short theory of the single sign: repetition as identity.

Judith Butler’s account of performativity showed how social identities congeal by reiterating stylised acts over time, under norms that both constrain and enable variation. There is, as Butler famously put it, “no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; [that] identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results”.

Repetition is how a form becomes legible, how doing something again and again can give the illusion of a stable being. It’s a minimalist strategy for making do within larger structures, a way to bring disparate daily situations “under one hat.”

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