Questions of Identity in Modern and Contemporary Critical Theories

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Questions of Identity in Modern and Contemporary
Critical Theories

• Introduction
• 2005/9/23

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Outline

• What is Identity?
• Identity and Related Terms
• Different Approaches to Identity Related Issues
• Examples for Analysis

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What is Identity?two kinds

• Answers to the question of who we are.
• Two basic kindssocial 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)

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What is Identity?as a process

• As a meeting point and temporary attachment
• the meeting point, the point of suture(??),
  between 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

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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)

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Identity Kinds

• Individual and collective
• Collective gender, race, national, etc.

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(No Transcript)
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Identity and Related Terms Body, Self, Person,
Identity, Subjectivity

• What do you think about these terms?
• Bodyas an order of connection as an 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
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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.
• Subjectivity1) 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
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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)

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Different Approachesstructure vs. agency

• (Pile and Thrift) Perspectives of structure
  perspectives of agency
• (Kidd) Identity and culture
• Structuralist sociology
• Marxism
• Functionalism (e.g. Durkheim) --sees
  socialization as a positive means by which to
  ensure that the individual conforms to the rules
  of the wider group.(18)
• Action sociology society a series of actions
  and interactions by individuals (54) social life
  makes sensemeaningful to those involved in its
  day-to-day creation (agent).

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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)

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Different Approaches (2)

• (du Gay, et al)
• The subject of language, ideology and
  discourse--thin analysis
• The subject of psychoanalysis --thick analysis
• Freudian/Lacanian
• Object Relations based in clinical work of
  public mental health services
• The subject in society and history.

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Possible Topics(1) for you to choose from

• I. Definition Kinds -- 
• Essentialism vs. Constructionism
• Identity and Difference, "the Constitutive
  Outside" (excluded or suspended, or necessary
  condition)
• Gendered, Racialized, National 
• From Enlightenment subject to fractured
  postmodern identity

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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

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Possible Topics

• IV. Identity and -- 
• Identity and language/representation (W 14-15)
• Identity and Body
• Identity and Time/History (W 19 - 
• What else?

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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.

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Examples for Analysis Alice in the Wonderland

• Empson on Alice a Freudian dream story
• 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.

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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 too 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/t
  heories/theorieslectures/freud/freudlecture.htm )

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Example (2) Alien

• Alien and the Monstrous Feminine
• In the womb-like enclosure
• The alien burst through Kanes stomach and he is
  forced, symbolically, to assume the role of
  mother at the dinner table.
• ? childrens misconception of pregnancy and
  birth.
• The other grotesque sexual images.

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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.