Identity

Theories of Identity:

ESSENTIALISM
- our bioligical make up makes us who we are
-an inner essance that makes us us
- post modern theorists disagree, anti essentialist

Phisiognomy, phrenology.
Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) the notion that criminal tendencies are inherited. You can see by the shape of someone face. (images on slide)

Hieronymous Bosch (1450 - 1516) Christ carrying the cross, oil on panel

Chris Pfili, Holy Virgin Mary 1996

• 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

farm work, soldier, factory worker, housewife

Charles Baudelaire – The Painter of Modern Life (1863)

introduces the concept of the gentleman stroller

Thorstein Veblen – Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

Conspicous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure

Georg Simmel – The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903)

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’ 

FOUCAULT DISCOURCE ANALYSIS

Identity is constructed out of the discources available to us.

Discource - '...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)

Possible discourses

- age - class - gender - nationality - race/ethnicity - sexual prientation - education - income etc...

OTHERNESS

Class

humphrey spender/mass observation, worktown project 1937

Nationality

Alexander McQueen, Highland Rape collection, autumn/winter 1995 - 6

Race/Ethnicity

Chris Ofili, No woman no cry 1998

Emily Bates, dress created using her own hair

Gender and Sexuality

Flapper 1925

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills, 1977 - 80

Sam Taylor Wood 1993

The postmodern condition:

Liquid modernity and liquid love

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

Identity 2004

Liquid Modernity 2000

Liquid Love 2003

‘In airports and other public spaces, people with mobile-phone headset attachments walk around, talking aloud and alone, like paranoid schizophrenics, oblivious to their immediate surroundings.

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.’ 

“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