Find Your Tribe assumes… • Our consumption is an expression of our identity (we express our identity through consumerism/ what we buy) • Our behaviour is an expression of our identity • Our identity comes not from our family/ background/ religion etc • We choose our identity, choosing to collect into groups • Our identity is fluid, and can change over time/ according to our pick’n’mix approach • The need to collect/ to have a collective identity is central to who we are. With out collectivity, there is no identity
Michel Maffesoli • “The time of tribes” • Mass culture has disintegrated • Today, social existence is conducted through fragmented tribal groupings, organized around the catchwords, brand-names and sound-bites of consumer culture • The rise of ‘identity politics’ • The ‘proliferation of lifestyle cultures’
My finger is glued to my chin
Modernist view of identity Postmodernist view of identity • Identity is received/ given/ •Pick’n’mix approach/ fluid/ eversolid/ stable/ unchanging changing
• Identity is inner; it is to be discovered
• We discover who we are
•Identity is behaviour/ identity is how you behave, not who you are •Identity is put on; it is yours to choose; Identity is performance •We choose who we are
Modernist or Postmodern Concepts of Identity? An individual’s sense of identity is created for them by the ideological structures/ frameworks/ apparatus that surround them from birth.
An individual chooses and shapes his/ her own identity.
Our identity exists in how we express ourselves (through what we buy, the media we use, the tribes we join, etc).
An individual’s identity is created through bricolage, a “pick’n’mix” approach, with the individual choosing different elements from different areas of their life and using this to make their own identity.
Identity is an open question, the answer to which is always changing.
In today’s world identity is not fixed and set; rather, it is always shifting and changing.
Identity is not who you are, it is how you behave.
We do not have AN identity but we have many identities. Identity is fragmented, plural and multiple.
Identity is not inherited, it is made.
Is your self-identity something you discover?
Is there such as thing as your core identity/ your inner self?
Does your identity develop?
Media texts often encourage us to construct narratives of the self (“It’s been such a journey.”)
Paul Ricoeur • French Philosopher • Narratives of the self • "On Selfhood: The Question of Personal Idenitity." • “The self is essentially a fiction through which we understand our lives as coherent stories (“narrative identity”). We are the stories we inhabit and tell about ourselves”.
Je suis un excentrique
Anthony Giddens “The narrative of the self” • Identity = narrative of the self • We create, maintain and revise a set of biographical narratives - the story of who we are, and how we came to be where we are now. • self-identity is a reflexive project we continuously work and reflect on • “What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in the post-traditional age” • If the self is 'made', rather than inherited or just passively static, what form is it in? What is the thing that we make?
“the unfinalised self”
Mikhail Bakhtin
Grand Narratives have collapsed – Class, Religion, Nationality…
Paul Ricoeur would say… • Instead, we shape our own narratives Jean-François Lyotard
• Sigmund Freud: “Identity is not stable or rational, but a ever-conflicted tension between id and ego, conscious and subconscious mind.” • Friedrich Nietzsche: “There is no Truth, only interpretations of the truth.” • Jacques Lacan: “The self, born vulnerable, forms identity through identifying with “images” on a doomed quest for a unified, stable sense of self.” • Paul Ricoeur: “The self is essentially a fiction through which we understand our lives as coherent stories (“narrative identity”). We are the stories we inhabit and tell about ourselves”. • Anthony Giddens: “The narrative of the self”