DIGITAL CULTURE AND SOCIOLOGY session 7

1
Digital Culture and Sociology

• Identity

2
about today

• Conceptual introduction
• Dibbell, Julian. A rape in Cyberspace.
• Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity
  Tribulations of the Self.
• Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen.
• SEMINAR Match-making session

identity
break
texts
break
3
what is identity?
Woodward

• Why is everyone so interested on identity at the
  moment?
• Do the words crisis of identity mean anything
  to you?
• Why do people invest in identity positions?
• Movement no question to national to personal
  (Freud) to modern crisis (Giddens) to postmodern
  dissolutions (Turkle?)

4
essentialist identity
Woodward

• Everybody from a country, ethnia, etc. shares a
  clear authentic set of characteristics with do
  not alter across time.
• Often claims of common history or culture
• Tied to the physical first territory, later
  body i.e. racial or sexual identity
• Disrupted by globalization, inmigration,
  break-ups such as USSR...

5
imaginary identity
Hall

• When we claim the past as an identity we
  reconstruct it (Caribbeanness)
• Becoming
• Difference, i.e. how Martinique is and is not
  French
• Main point we are not only positioned by
  identity, we can also position ourselves and
  reconstruct and transform historical identities.

6
group identities
Woodward

• Bourdieu- individuals integrated in fields
  families, peer groups, work, etc. Each has a
  material context and symbolic resources.
• We are the same person but have different roles
  (Goffman)
• Thomas Højrup- Life Mode analysis people, same
  country, qualitatively different cultures, or
  life modes, each of which has its own specific
  material conditions, a specific praxis and a
  corresponding ideology.
• Giddens modernity threatens self-identity (or
  positive hypercomplexity Qvortrup)

7
Identity keywords
Woodward

• Identities are produced at particular points in
  time (i.e. hippies, womens liberation movements)
• parameters cut accross each other class,
  country, religion, gender...
• Difference as essential to meaning, dichotomies,
  ex. Cixous activity/passivity, culture/nature,
  father/mother, intelligible/sensitive...
  Important divisions not equally weighted
• Subjectivity sense of self, then we adopt
  identity

8
Identity keywords II
Woodward

• Althusser- Interpellation, how subjects are
  recruited into subject positions through
  recognizing themselves, yes, its me.
  Unconscious process
• The unsconscious origin in Freud, developed by
  Lacan in relation to identity
• Lacan unified human subject is a myth, children
  learn, entry into languagesubjectivity, entry of
  the fathersubconscious birth, phallus as first
  signifier, girls and boys positioned differently.

9
complementary bibliography

• ALTHUSSER, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and
  Other Essays. London New Left Books.
• CIXOUS, Hélène. 1975. Sorties In MARKS, 1980.
  French Feminisms an anthology. Amherst The
  University of Massachussetts Press.
• GOFFMAN, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self
  in Everyday Life. New York Doubleday.
• HALL, Stuart. 1990. Cultural Identity and
  Diaspora, in Rutherford, J. (ed). Identity
  community, culture, difference. London Lawrence
  and Wishart.
• HøJRUP, Thomas. 1983. On the Concept of
  Life-Mode. A Formspecifying Mode of Analysis
  Applied to Contemporary Western Europe.
  Ethnologia Scandinavica.
• LACAN, Jacques. 1977. Écrits a selection.
  London Tavistock.
• WOODWARD, Kathryn. 1997. Concepts of Identity
  and Difference. In Identity and Difference.
  London Sage.

10
(No Transcript)
11
New thing liberation from power point

• We discuss the three texts just with the texts
• ?