Identity COP

Lecture 9 – 13/12/2012

Identity – James Beighton

Summary

To introduce historical conceptions of identity

To introduce Foucault’s ‘discourse’ methodology

To place and critique contemporary practice within these frameworks, and to consider their validity

To consider ‘postmodern’ theories of identity as ‘fluid’ and ‘constructed’

To consider identity today, especially in the digital domain

Theories

Essentialism (traditional approach)

Our biological make up makes us who we are

We all have an inner essence that makes us who we are

Post modern theorists disagree

Post modern theorists are anti essentialist

Physiognomy legitimizing racism

Irish Iberian

Anglo teutonic

Negro

Historical phases of identity

Pre modern identity – personal identity is stable, defined by long standing roles

Modern identity – possibility to start choosing your identity, rather than simply being born into it. People start to worry about who they are

Post modern identity – accepts a fragmented self. Identity is constructed

Pre modern identity

Institutions determined identity

Marriage, the church, the state, work eg.

Secure identities

Farm working

Soldier

Factory worker

Housewife

Gentleman

Husband-wife

Modern identity 19^th and early 20^th centuries

Baudelaire – introduces concept of the flaneur (gentleman stroller)

Veblen – conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure

Georg Simmel

Trickle down theory

Emulation

Distinction

The mask of fashion

‘The feeling of isolation is rarely as decisive and intense when one actually finds oneself physically alone, as when one is a stranger without relations, among many physically close persons, at a party, on the train, or in the traffic of a large city’.

Simmel suggest that because of the speed and mutability of modernity, individuals withdraw into themselves to find peace

He describes this as the separation of the subjective from the objective life.

Post modern identity ‘Discourse Analysis’

Identity is constructed out of the discourses culturally available to us

Discourse is a set of recurring statements that define a particular culture object eg. Madness, criminality, sexuality, and provide concepts and terms through which such an object can be studied or discussed. (Cavallaro, 2001)

Possible discourses:

Age, class, gender, nationality, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, education, income ect. Discourses to be considered: class, nationality, race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality

Class

“’Society’… reminds one of a particularly shrews cunning and pokerfaced player in the game of life, cheating if given a chance, flouting rules whenever possible”

(Bauman 2004)

Nationality

“much of the press coverage centered around accusations of misogyny because of the imagery of semi naked staggering and brutalized women, in conjunction with the word ‘rape’ in the title. But McQueen claimed that the rape was of Scotland, not the individual models, as the theme of the show was the Jacobite rebellion”.

Race/Ethnicity

Gillian Wearing, from signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say 1992-3

“Hair has been a big issue throughout my life… it often felt that I was nothing more than my hair in other peoples eyes” Emily Bates

Gender and sexuality

‘Edmund Bergler, an American psychoanalyst writing in the 1950s, went much further, both in condemning the ugliness of fashion and in relating it to sex. He recognized that the fashion industry is the work not of women, but of men. It’s monstrosities, he argued, were a ‘gigantic unconscious hoax’ perpetrated on women by the arch villains of the Cold war – male homosexuals (for he made the vulgar assumption that all dress designers are ‘queers’). Having first, in the 1920’s tried to turn women into boys, they had latterly expressed their secret hatred of women by forcing them into exaggerated, ridiculous, hideous clothes’. (Wilson, E. 1985)

Masquerade and the mash of femininity

Wonderbra, Gillian Wearing, Lynne 1993-6

The Post Modern Condition:

Liquid Modernity and Liquid Love

Post modern Theory:

Identity is constructed through our social experience

Erving Goffman The presentation of self in Everyday life (1959)

Goffman saw life as theatre, made up of encounters and performances

For Goffman the self is a serious facades

Zygmunt Bauman

Identity (2004)

Liquid Modernity (2000)

Liquid Love (2003)

‘Yes, indeed ‘Identity’ is revealed to us only as something to be invented rather than discovered; as a target of an effort, “an objective”.

“We use art, architecture, literature, and the rest and advertising as well, to shield ourselves, in advance of experience, from the stark and plain reality in which we are fated to live. (Theodore Levitt 1970)

Postmodern Identity

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

Enlightenment philosopher: ‘I think therefore I am’ (discourse on method, 1637)

“The typical cultural spectator of postmodernity is viewed as a largely home centered and increasingly solitary player who, via various forms of ‘telemediation’ (stereos, game consoles, videos and television) revels in a domesticated (i.e private and tamed) ‘world at a distance” (Darley 2000)

“If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favorite things, I can construct an artificial  representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval. (‘I like Facebook,’ said another friend. ‘I got a shag out of it’)”

(Tom Hodgkinson 2008)

“In the Brave new world of fleeting chances and frail securities, the old-style stiff non negotiable identities simply wont do’ (Bauman 2004)

“Fun they may be, these virtual communities but they create only an illusion of intimacy and a pretense of community” (Charles Handy 2001)

“Identity” is a hopelessly ambiguous idea and a double-edged sword. It may be a war cry of individuals, or of the communities that wish to be imagined by them. At one time the edge of identity is turned against “collective pressures” by individuals who resent conformity and hold dear their own ways of living (which “the group” would decry as prejudices) and their own ways of living (which “the group” would condemn as cases of “deviation” or “silliness”, but at any rate of abnormality, needing to be cured or punished”

(Bauman 2004)