Identity james.beighton@leeds-art.ac.uk
Lecture Summary • To introduce historical conceptions of identity • To introduce Foucault’s ‘discourse’ methodology • To place and critique contemporary practice within these frameworks, and to consider their validity • To consider ‘postmodern’ theories of identity as ‘fluid’ and ‘constructed’ (in particular Zygmunt Bauman) • To consider identity today, especially in the digital domain
Theories of Identity • ESSENTIALISM (traditional approach) • Our biological make up makes us who we are. • We all have an inner essence that makes us who we are. • POST MODERN THEORISTS DISAGREE • Post-Modern theorists are ANTIESSENTIALIST (more of this later …)
Physiognomy Phrenology Cesare Lombroso (1835 – 1909) – Founder of Positivist Criminology – the notion that criminal tendencies are inherited
Physiognomy legitimising racism
Hieronymous Bosch (1450 - 1516) Christ carrying the Cross, Oil on panel, c. 1515
Chris Ofili, Holy Virgin Mary, 1996
Historical phases of Identity Douglas Kellner – Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern, 1992 • •
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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
Pre-Modern Identity ‘Secure’ identities related institutional agency with vested interest
Farm-worker ………. The Soldier ……. The Factory Worker… The Housewife…… The Gentleman…. Husband-Wife (family)…..
landed gentry The state Industrial capitalism patriarchy patriarchy 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)
Modern identity 19th and early 20th centuries Baudelaire – introduces concept of the ‘flaneur’ (gentleman-stroller) Veblen – ‘Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure’ Gustave Caillebotte (1848 - 94), Le Pont de l’Europe, 1876
Modern identity 19th and early 20th centuries Simmel • Trickle down theory • Emulation • Distinction • The ‘Mask’ of Fashion
Gustave Caillebotte (1848 - 94), Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877
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’
Edvard Munch, Evening on Karl Johan, Oil on Canvas, 1892
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’
Post-modern 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)
Michel Foucault
Possible Discourses • • • • • • • • •
Age Class Gender Nationality Race/ethnicity Sexual orientation Education Income Etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.,
Discourses to be considered • • • •
Class Nationality Race/ethnicity Gender and sexuality
‘Otherness’
Class
Humphrey Spender/Mass Observation, Worktown project, 1937
Martin Parr, New Brighton, Merseyside, from The Last Resort, 1983 - 86
Martin Parr, Ascot, 2003
‘ “Society” …reminds one of a particularly shrewd, cunning and pokerfaced player in the game of life, cheating if given a chance, flouting rules whenever possible’ Bauman (2004), Identity, page 52
Nationality
Martin Parr, Sedlescombe, from Think of England, 2000-2003
Martin Parr, Think of Germany, Berlin, 2002
‘Much of the press coverage centred around accusations of misogyny because of the imagery of semi-naked, staggering and brutalized women, in conjunction with the word “rape” in the title. But McQueen claimed that the rape was of Scotland, not the individual models, as the theme of the show was the Jacobite rebellion’. Evans, C. ‘Desire and Dread: Alexander McQueen and the Contemporary Femme Fatale’ in Entwistle, J. and Wilson, M., (2001), Body Dressing, Oxford, Berg, page 202
Alexander McQueen, Highland Rape collection, Autumn/Winter 1995 - 6
Vivienne Westwood, Anglomania collection, Autumn/Winter 1993 - 4
Las Vegas
‘I didn’t like Europe as much as I liked Disney World. At Disney World all the countries are much closer together, and they just show you the best of each country. Europe is more boring. People talk strange languages and things are dirty. Sometimes you don’t see anything interesting in Europe for days, but at Disney World something different happens all the time, and people are happy. It’s much more fun. It’s well designed!’ A college graduate just back from her first trip to Europe, in Papanek, V. (1995), The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture, London, Thames and Hudson, page 139
Race/Ethnicity
Chris Ofili No Woman, No Cry 1998
Chris Ofili, Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars , 1994
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
Alexander McQueen, It’s A Jungle Out There collection, Autumn/Winter 1997 - 8
Alexander McQueen, 1997
Titian, Saint Mary Magdalene, c.1532
‘Hair has been a big issue throughout my life… It often felt that I was nothing more than my hair in other peoples’ eyes’ Emily Bates, Textile Designer/Artist
Emily Bates, Dress, created using her own hair
Gender and sexuality
‘Edmund Bergler, an American psychoanalyst writing in the 1950s, went much further, both in condemning the ugliness of fashion and in relating it to sex. He recognised that the fashion industry is the work not of women, but of men. Its monstrosities, he argued, were a “gigantic unconscious hoax” perpetrated on women by the arch villains of the Cold War –male homosexuals (for he made the vulgar assumption that all dress designers are “queers”). Having first, in the 1920s, tried to turn women into boys, they had latterly expressed their secret hatred of women by forcing them into exaggerated, ridiculous, hideous clothes’ Wilson, E. (1985), Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London, I.B. Tauris, page 94
Cover of La Garconne, by Victor Marguerite, 1922, and ‘Garconne’ in dress by Welly Soeurs, c. 1926
Flapper, 1925
Androgyny 1920s style, from Punch magazine
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
Masquerade and the mask of femininity
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills, 1977 - 80
Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel, 1994
Sam Taylor-Wood, Portrait (Fuck, Suck, Spank, Wank), 1993.
Tracey Emin, Everyone I have ever slept with 1963 - 95, 1995
Wonderbra
Gillian Wearing, Lynne, 1993 - 6
The Postmodern condition: Liquid Modernity and Liquid Love
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
Zygmunt Bauman Identity (2004) Liquid Modernity (2000) Liquid Love (2003)
‘Yes, indeed, “identity” is revealed to us only as something to be invented rather than discovered; as a target of an effort, “an objective”’
‘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
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
‘We use art, architecture, literature, and the rest, and advertising as well, to shield ourselves, in advance of experience, from the stark and plain reality in which we are fated to live’. Theodore Levitt, The Morality (?) of Advertising,1970
Postmodern Identity Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650), Enlightenment Philosopher: ‘I think therefore I am’ (Discourse on Method, 1637)
Barbara Kruger, I shop therefore I am, 1987,
Barbara Kruger/Selfridges, Buy Me. I’ll change your life/ You want it You buy it You forget it, 2006
Barbara Kruger/Selfridges, I shop therefore I am, 2006
‘[The] family trip to a shopping mall is the present-day incarnation of the sacred’ Bauman (2004), Identity, page 71
“The typical cultural spectator of postmodernity is viewed as a largely home centred and increasingly solitary player who, via various forms of ‘telemediation’ (stereos, game consoles, videos and televisions), revels in a domesticated (i.e. private and tamed) ‘world at a distance’” Darley (2000), Visual Digital Culture, p.187
“If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval. (‘I like Facebook,’ said another friend. ‘I got a shag out of it’)” Tom Hodgkinson (2008), ‘With friends like these …’, Guardian, 14/01/08
“The notion ‘you are who you pretend to be’ has a mythic resonance. The Pygmalion story endures because it speaks to a powerful fantasy: that we are not limited by our histories, that we can be recreated or can recreate ourselves... Virtual worlds provide environments for experiences that may be hard to come by in the real” Sherry Turkle (1994), Constructions and Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual Reality
‘In the brave new world of fleeting chances and frail securities, the old-style stiff and non-negotiable identities simply won’t do’ Bauman (2004), Identity, page 27
‘Fun they may be, these virtual communities, but they create only an illusion of intimacy and a pretence of community’ Charles Handy (2001), The Elephant and the Flea, Hutchinson, page 204
‘ “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
Further Reading Bauman, Z. 2004) Identity, Cambridge, Polity Press Benwell, B. and Stokoe, E. (2006) Discourse and Identity, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press Gauntlett, D. (2008), Media, Gender and Identity: an introduction, London and New York, Routledge Kidd, W. (2001), Culture and Identity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan Woodward, K. (ed.) (1999), Identity and Difference, Milton Keynes, Open University Press