OUGD501 - Context of Practice: Identity Seminar

Identity

Essential-ism - Innate characteristic which defines you as a person
Anti essential-ism - Shaped by your environment/surroundings/society

Digital identity - Escapism, people can invent their own identity using the online world. You can almost reinvent your identity outside of society. This is not necessarily to do with consumption. Eg. second life. 

Post modern anti essential-ist - Identity is almost fluid and more unstable. This proposes that we can reinvent ourselves constantly and endlessly.

Identity and 'the other' in visual representation

• Creation of identities
• Concepts of 'otherness'
• Analysis of visual example

Identity - who we are and how other perceive who we are

Identity Creation

Discussion - Write down a list of what factors makes you you

• Friends
• Family
• Hobbies
• Interests
• Life experience
• Where you are from
• Background
• Personality traits (introvert/extrovert)

Group discussion

• Parents/Socialisation/Money
• Education
• Environment
• Marital status
• The era you were born in
• Diet (It can affect your health or how you are perceived. It can also have an impact on your mood as well)
• There are physical determinants as well as social

The way we express our identity in our day to day lives

• Hobbies
• Possessions
• The way we dress
• Mannerisms
• Ethics/Morals (how you put them into practice)

Group discussion

• Possessions (fashion) particularly in urban areas. Can be seen as a bit of a barrier or defense to stop people knowing exactly who you are. 
• Tattoos/Piercings/Make up
• Brands
• Social interactions - Says a lot about your personality. How you treat other people.
• Accents
• Interests/Hobbies
• Who you associate with (social circles

You can judge a society by how it treats its citizens - Gandy.

All of the above are known as subjectivities. This is the world for all of what we have just talked about. It is our sense of self which is really complex and slippery to understand. We could keep talking about it forever. Our subjectivity of who we are as individuals is complex and has been arrived at by a variety of things. It is almost limited and given to us by our position in society, our status and where we were born for example. It is also reached by our own creation of who we are. We are what wider society thinks we are as well as what we think of ourselves or how we see ourselves.

The Circuit of Culture - Stuart Hall

• Culture is the framework within which our identities are formed, expressed and regulated
• Five sub categories which all equally affect our identities (representation, identity, production, consumption, regulation)
• Production - What you do in society for a job
• Regulation - Laws, societal limits
• Identity - Expected roles, stereotypes

It is all of these things in a complex multi-determined, shifting cycle.

Identity Formation

• Process from psychoanalysis
• Jacques LACAN
• The 'hommelette'
• The 'Mirror Stage'

He comes up with the idea of otherness which he sees as central to our identities. His ideas have become really influential in the 20th century, particularly with the feminist theory. 

Otherness - When you are born you don't understand or have any comprehension that you are distinct or separate from your mother, as you feed off her and are linked in various different ways. You don't have any conception of yourself as a separate being. He describes a baby as a hommelette, a scrambled up confused mix.

This leads on to the mirror stage which is between 6 and 18 months which is the first bit of identity formation. He uses the metaphor of a baby crawling past itself in the mirror and seeing for the first time, externally, its sense of itself as a being in the world. This is the first time you get the sense of being an individual and different from other things in the world. From this stage he is arguing that we gain a sense of who we are by the reactions of the outside world to us. 

Identity is based on the views we receive from others. It is not necessarily about who we would like to be or who we think we are but instead the reception of others. 

BUT

• This sense of our own identity is fragile
• Our own subjectivity is fragile
• It is based on an illusion
• Receiving views from others

All the rest of our actions and all of our attempts to dress in a certain way to strive for status and popularity is part of the same process. There is never one moment when you are entirely happy because you never have the stable identity because it is so complex.

Constructing the 'other'

• Problems: Relies on the assumption of opposition and radical otherness
• In order to make our identity seem more solid we measure ourselves against what we are not
• In the same way that we create our own identities - in opposition to what we are not - so does a society

When looking at our examples from earlier we tried to make links to othering:

• Brands - If you buy a really expensive brand you know that you are not one of the council estate underclass individuals.
• Accents - If you start talking very properly with renounced pronunciation you are saying you are part of an educated class. By doing this you are making a valued judgement and stereotyping other to make your identity seem more secure and stable.

The Lynx advert example - Othering is present because if you don't wear Lynx then you won't be sexy. You wouldn't be seen as dominant. There are lots of women in the advert and so this could suggest that you could be seen as one of the women if you don't buy it.

Identification

• Shores up unstable identities through the illusion of unity
• Shared fashions, belief systems, values

- Subterranean Values (Matza, 1961)

We are democratic and educated and civilised because we are not savages like them. This is where you get racism from, sexist from and all forms of prejudice.

We are in a state of constant crisis and we have to keep trying new attempts of othering.