Questions of Identity in Modern and Contemporary Critical Theories

Introduction2005/9/23

Outline

What is “Identity”? Identity and Related Terms Different Approaches to Identity &

Related Issues Examples for Analysis

What is “Identity”?—two kinds

Answers to the question of ‘who we are.’ Two basic kinds—social and personal: "The

conceptions we hold of ourselves are we may call self-identity, while the expectations and opinions of others form our social identity" (Barker 165). 

"The positions which we take up and identify with constitute our identities" (Woodwards 39) (roles, symbols)

What is “Identity”?—as a process

As a meeting point and temporary attachment “the meeting point, the point of suture（縫合） , bet

ween on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to 'interpellate', speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be 'spoken'.  Identities are thus temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us (Hall 6).

Identity in Language

Identity: Definitions (3)

1. is marked out by difference (which is underpinned by exclusion)

2. is marked out through symbols (eg. Cigarettes)

3. the construction of identity is both symbolic and social.

4. identities are not unified (may have contradictions)

5. is not fixed. = a process of identification. (K Woodwards)

Identity: Kinds

Individual and collective; Collective: gender, race, national, etc.

Identity and Related Terms: Body, Self, Person, Identity, Subjectivity

What do you think about these terms? Body—as an order of connection; as a

n origin; as the pre-discursive; as a site of cultural consumption; as a project of representation.

Self – 1) self-awareness (a priori unity of experience); 2) a series of experience.

Thrift and Pile

Identity and Related Terms: Body, Self, Person, Identity, Subjectivity (2)

Person – ‘a description of the cultural framework of the self.’ --1) not necessary for people of different culture; 2) a political issue

Identity –to recognize or to construct it; psychoanalytic approach and dynamic approach.

Subjectivity—1) Cartesian notion rejected– unitary and universal being made up of mind and body, 2) rooted in body, orchestrated by narrative, registered through a series of senses.

Thrift and Pile

Identity and Related Terms: Interconnected

subjectivitiy: "the condition of being a person and the processes by which we become a person, that is, how we are constituted as subjects" (Barker 165). 

"Subjectivity include our sense of self.  It involves the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions which constitute our sense of 'who we are' and positions within culture."  (W 39)

Different Approaches—structure vs. agency (Pile and Thrift) Perspectives of structure; p

erspectives of agency; (Kidd) Identity and culture: 1. Structuralist sociology–

Marxism Functionalism (e.g. Durkheim) : --”sees socializ

ation as a positive means by which to ensure that the individual conforms to the rules of the wider group.”(18)

2. Action sociology –society –a series of actions and interactions by individuals (54); social life makes sense—meaningful to those involved in its day-to-day creation (agent).

Agency

Agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place . . . Agency concerns events of which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that the individual could, at any phase in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differently. Whatever happened would not have happened if that individual had not intervened. Action is a continuous process . . . (Giddens qtd in Kidd p. 75)

Different Approaches (2)

(du Gay, et al) 1. The subject of language, ideology and disc

ourse;--thin analysis2. The subject of psychoanalysis; --thick anal

ysis Freudian/Lacanian Object Relations – based in clinical work of publ

ic mental health services

3. The subject in society and history.

Possible Topics(1) –for you to choose from:

I. Definition & Kinds --  Essentialism vs. Constructionism Identity and Difference, "the Constitutiv

e Outside" (excluded or suspended, or necessary condition)

Gendered, Racialized, National  From Enlightenment subject to fracture

d postmodern identity

Possible Topics:

II.  Formation Discursive and Psychic formations of

identity interpellation and investment III. Politics  Crisis of identity (globalization -- W 15-19;

Dislocation W 21) Politics of Identity, of location Strategic, positional definition of identity Diaspora identity (W 58) Agency, articulation

Possible Topics:

IV. Identity and --  Identity and language/representation

(W 14-15) Identity and Body Identity and Time/History (W 19 -  What else?

Examples for Analysis: Alice in the Wonderland

1. A Darwinian Reading: the Wonderland as a post-Darwinian world of change and uncertainties, which has a series of social games as stasis resisting change, and in which Alice adapts herself to the reality of change and rejects the games as stasis.

Examples for Analysis: Alice in the Wonderland

Empson on Alice: a Freudian dream story 1. A fall through a deep hole into the secrets

of Mother Earth produces a new enclosed soul wondering who it is, what will be its position in the world, and how it can get out. It is in a long low hall, part of the palace of the Queen of Hearts (a neat touch), from which it can only get out to the fresh air and the fountains through a hole frighteningly too small.

Examples for Analysis: Alice in the Wonderland

Empson on Alice: a Freudian dream story (2) The nightmare theme of the birth-trauma, that she grows to

o big for the room and is almost crushed by it, is not only used here but repeated more painfully after she seems to have got out; the rabbit sends her sternly into its house and some food there makes her grow again.

She runs the whole gamut; she is a father in getting down the hole, a foetus at the bottom, and can only be born by becoming a mother and producing her own amniotic fluid. (source: http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/staff/tom/teaching/theories/theorieslectures/freud/freudlecture.htm )

Example (2): Alien

“Alien and the Monstrous Feminine”

1. In the womb-like enclosure;

2. The alien burst through Kane’s stomach and he is forced, symbolically, to assume the role of mother at the dinner table.

33 children’s misconception of pregnancy and birth. `

4. The other grotesque sexual images.

Work Cited

Hall, Stuart. “Who Needs Identity?” Hall, Stuart & Paul du Gay, eds. Questions of Cultural Identity.  London: Sage, 1996.

Woodward, Kathryn ed.   Identity and Difference.   London: Sage, 1997.

Kidd, Warren. Culture and Identity (Skills-based Sociology S.) Macmillan, 2001.

Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift eds, 1995, Mapping the subject: geography of cultural transformation, Routledge, London.