•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
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.
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’.
Fatale’ in Entwistle, J. and Wilson, M., (2001),Body Dressing, Oxford, Berg
Las Vegas doesnt hold its own identity, copies other places. Americans don't have to
travel they can see it all in their own country.
‘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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