Lecture summary
- Introduce historical conceptions of identity
- To introduce Foucault's discourse methodology
- Place and critique contemporary practice within these frameworks, and to consider their validity
- Consider postmodern theories
Theories of Identity
- Essentialism (traditional approach)
- Our biological make up makes us who are are
Physiognomy
The more vertical the line the more intelligent we are meant to be.
Phrenology
Cesare Lombraso (1835-1909) founder of positivist criminology which is the notion that criminal tendencies are inherited.
Physiognomy legitimising racism
Hieronymous Bosch (1450-1516)
Christ carrying the Cross, Oil on panel 1515
Historical phases of Identity
Douglas Kellner - Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern, 1992
- 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
Institutions determined identity
Marriage, The Church, monarchy,
Government, the State, Work
‘Secure’ identities
related institutional agency
with vested interest
Farm-worker ………. landed gentry
The Soldier ……. The state
The Factory Worker… Industrial capitalism
The Housewife…… patriarchy
The Gentleman…. patriarchy
Husband-Wife (family)….. Marriage/church
Modern identity
19th and early 20th centuries
Charles Baudelaire – The Painter of Modern Life (1863)
Thorstein Veblen – Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
Georg Simmel – The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903)
Gustave Caillebotte (1848 - 94),
Le Pont de l’Europe, 1876
Baudelaire – introduces
concept of the ‘flaneur’
(gentleman-stroller)
Veblen – ‘Conspicuous
consumption of valuable
goods is a means of
reputability to the
gentleman of leisure’
Georg Simmel
‘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’
Simmel suggests that:
because of the speed and mutability of
modernity, individuals withdraw into
themselves to find peace
He describes this as
‘the separation of the subjective from the
objective life’
Postmodern identity
'Discourse Analysis'
Identity is constructed out of the discourses culturally available to us.
What is a discourse?
‘… 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 orientation
Education
Income
Etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.,
Class
Nationality
Race/ethnicity
Gender and sexuality
Otherness - Based around a history written by middle-upper class white european men.
Class
Humphrey Spender/Mass Observation, Worktown project 1937
- Analyse how the other peple live. The upper class.
- Assumption of working class people at play etc
Martin Parr, New Brighton, Merseyside, from The Last Resort 1983-86
- People will money are interested in his work
- People lying in litter wouldn't buy this book
- They also wouldn't go and look at the exhibition of his work
Martin Parr, Ascot, 2003
- He is documenting Ascot where people drink champagne and get dressed up
- Is it about lower class and upper class
Martin Parr, Think of Germany
- Sums up Germany eating a sausage
Alexander McQueen, AW 1995-6
- He claims it isn't to do with the rape of women it is about the Scots and English
Vivienne Westwood AW 1993-4
- Tartan clothing - Is it representing Scotland?
Chris Ofili No Woman No Cry 1998
- The first important black painter
- Picked up by Andy Warhol
- Grows up in Manchester
- Goes to Art college
Gillian Wearing, from signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say 1992-3
- Won the Turner prize for this
- Stereotypes of identity?
- Volkswagen created an ad campaign based on it
Alexander McQueen
- When he uses black models he uses animal prints, leather and suede
Emily Bates dress created using her own hair
- Mary Magdalene has red hair which is where the judgments come from today
- Installation piece which is why it is a long dress
- Collects hair from hairdressers
Gender and Sexuality
- Can see legs in imagery - shocking at the time (Flapper 1925)
- Androgyny 1920s style from Punch magazine
- Gillian Wearing 'I don't want to look like a boy'
- Masquerade and the mask of femininity (Cindy Sherman, 1977-80) Takes these stereotypes of characters in films who are fragile, taken from a male perspective
- Gillian 'Lynne' Sex change
Post Modern Theory
- 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
- ‘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.’
- Andy Hargreaves (2003), Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity, Open University Press, page 25
