Questions of Identity in Modern and Contemporary Critical Theories

1. Questions of Identityin Modern and Contemporary Critical Theories Introduction 2005/9/23

2. Outline • What is “Identity”? • Identity and Related Terms • Different Approaches to Identity & Related Issues • Examples for Analysis

3. 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)

4. What is “Identity”?—as a process • As a meeting point and temporary attachment • “the meeting point, the point of suture（縫合）, 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

5. 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)

6. Identity: Kinds • Individual and collective; • Collective: gender, race, national, etc.

8. Identity and Related Terms: Body, Self, Person, Identity, Subjectivity • What do you think about these terms? • Body—as 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

9. 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

10. 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)

11. Different Approaches—structure 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 sense—meaningful to those involved in its day-to-day creation (agent).

12. 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)

13. 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.

14. 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

15. 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

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

17. Examples for Analysis: Alice in the Wonderland • 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.

18. 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.

19. 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/theories/theorieslectures/freud/freudlecture.htm )

20. Example (2): Alien • “Alien and the Monstrous Feminine” • In the womb-like enclosure; • The alien burst through Kane’s stomach and he is forced, symbolically, to assume the role of mother at the dinner table. •  children’s misconception of pregnancy and birth. ` • The other grotesque sexual images.

21. 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.