Lecture 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’ (in particular
Zygmunt Bauman)
•To consider identity today,
especially in the digital domain
Theories of identity
•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 (more of this later …)
PHYSIOGNOMY legitimising racism, racial identity
Cesare
Lombroso (1835 – 1909) – Founder
of
Positivist Criminology – the notion that
criminal
tendencies are inherited
Historical Phases of identity
Douglas Kellner – Media Culture: Cultural Studies,
Identity and
Politics
between the Modern and the Postmodern,
1992
•pre
modern identity
– personal identity is stable – defined by long standing roles
•Modern
identity –
modern societies begin to offer a wider range of social roles. 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, monarchy,
Government, the State, Work
‘Secure’ identities
related institutional agency
with
vested interest
Farm-worker ………. landed gentry
The Soldier ……. The state
The Factory Worker… Industrial capitalism
The Housewife…… patriarchy
The Gentleman…. patriarchy
Husband-Wife (family)….. Marriage/church
Modern Identity
Charles Baudelaire – The
Painter of Modern Life
(1863)
Thorstein Veblen – Theory
of the Leisure Class
(1899)
Georg Simmel – The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903)
Gustave Caillebotte
(1848 - 94),
Le Pont de l’Europe,
1876
Baudelaire – introduces
concept of the ‘flaneur’
(gentleman-stroller)
Veblen – ‘Conspicuous
consumption of valuable
goods is a means of
reputability to the
gentleman of leisure’
Gustave Caillebotte
(1848 - 94),
Paris Street, Rainy Day,
1877
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’
Edvard
Munch, Evening
on Karl Johan,
Oil
on Canvas, 1892
Simmel
suggests 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.
•
What is a discourse ?
•‘… a
set of recurring statements that define a particular cultural ‘object’ (e.g.,
madness, criminality, sexuality) and provide concepts and terms through which
such an object can be studied and discussed.’ Cavallaro,
(2001)
•Age
•Class
•Gender
•Nationality
•Race/ethnicity
•Sexual orientation
•Education
•Income
•Etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.,
•Class
•Nationality
•Race/ethnicity
Gender and sexuality
CLASS
Martin Par
Brighton Photos
Royal Ascot
‘ “Society” …reminds one of a
particularly shrewd,
cunning and pokerfaced player in
the game of life,
cheating if given a chance,
flouting rules whenever
possible’
Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood - Culture appropriation
‘Much of the press coverage
centred 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’.
Las Vegas is a replicar of many different places, it doesnt hold its own identity
‘I
didn’t like Europe as much as I liked Disney World. At
Disney
World all the countries are much closer together, and
they
just show you the best of each country.
Europe is more
boring. People talk strange languages and things are
dirty.
Sometimes
you don’t see anything interesting in Europe for
days,
but at Disney World something different happens all the
time,
and people are happy. It’s much more
fun. It’s well
designed!’
A college graduate just back from
her first trip to Europe, in Papanek, V.
(1995), The
Green
Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture,
London, Thames and
Hudson, page 139
Race/Ethnicity
Chris Ofili
first important black artist.
He used elephant dung to prop up his paintings, symbolising his roots of Africa.
In the painting No Woman No Cry he has put images of Steven Lawrence in the tears.
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
The racial inequality is shown in these images, the Alexander McQueen model at he top is dressed in a bulls outfit, he has stereotyped black people with the image that people might associate with there country. The image below shows the strong masculine man with crocodile skin boots and then looking away from him is his 2 'servants' who appear to be lesser than him.
‘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, Textile
Designer/Artist
Emily
Bates, Dress,
created using her own hair
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 recognised that the fashion industry
is the work not of women, but of men.
Its
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 1920s,
tried to turn women into boys, they
had latterly
expressed their secret hatred of women by forcing
them into exaggerated, ridiculous,
hideous clothes’
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 series of facades
Zygmunt Bauman
‘Yes, indeed, “identity” is
revealed to us only as something to be invented rather than discovered; as a
target of an effort, “an objective”’
Introspection is a
disappearing act. Faced with moments alone in their cars, on the street or at
supermarket checkouts, more and more people do not collect their thoughts, but
scan their mobile phone messages for shreds of evidence that someone, somewhere
may need or want them.’
Andy Hargreaves (2003), Teaching
in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity,
Open University Press, page 25
‘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, The
Morality (?) of Advertising,1970
Post modern identity
Rene
Descartes
(1596
– 1650),
Enlightenment
Philosopher:
‘I
think therefore I am’ (Discourse on Method,
1637)
Barbara
Kruger, I
shop therefore I am, 1987,
‘[The] family trip to a shopping mall
is the
present-day incarnation of the
sacred’
“The typical cultural spectator of
postmodernity is viewed as a largely home
centred and increasingly solitary player who,
via various forms of ‘telemediation’ (stereos,
game consoles, videos and televisions),
revels in a domesticated (i.e. private
and
tamed) ‘world at a distance’”
Darley (2000), Visual
Digital Culture,
p.187
“The notion ‘you are who you
pretend to be’ has a mythic
resonance. The Pygmalion story endures because it
speaks to a powerful fantasy: that
we are not limited by our
histories, that we can be recreated
or can recreate
ourselves... Virtual worlds provide
environments for
experiences that may be hard to
come by in the real”
Sherry
Turkle (1994), Constructions
and Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual Reality
‘In the brave new world of fleeting
chances and frail
securities, the old-style stiff and
non-negotiable identities
simply won’t do’
Bauman (2004), Identity, page 27
second life
‘Fun they may be, these virtual
communities, but they create only an illusion of intimacy and a pretence of
community’
Charles Handy (2001), The
Elephant and the Flea,
Hutchinson, page 204
‘ “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), Identity, page 76
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