Issues of subjectivity and identity (cultural studies 5.1 session 4) PDF

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Issues of subjectivity and identityKey concepts- agency- Anti-essentialism- Constructionism- Discourse- Essentialism- Identification- Identity- Identity project- Subject position- Subjectivity- examines debates in cultural studies about objectivity and cultural identity- Explores assumptions of the ...

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Issues of subjectivity and identity Key concepts - agency - Essentialism - Subject position - Anti-essentialism - Identification - Subjectivity - Constructionism - Identity - Discourse - Identity project - examines debates in cultural studies about objectivity and cultural identity - Explores assumptions of the western „regime of the self“ - „identity“ emerged as the central theme of cultural studies during the 90s - Politics of feminism, ethnicity, sexual orientation —> high profile concerns connected t politics of identity Subjectivity and identity - concepts are closely connected and virtually inseparable —> still need to make a distinction between them - Subjectivity - The condition of being a person and the processes by which e become a person - How we are constituted as cultural subjects and how we experience ourselves - What is a person? - Self-identity - Conceptions we hold about ourselves and our emotional identification with those self-descriptions - How do we see ourselves and how to others see us? - Social identity - Expectations and opinions others have of us - Subjectivity and identity: narrative or story-like form when talking about them Personhood as a cultural production - subjectivity and identity are culturally specific productions - Identities are social constructions and cannot exist outside of cultural representations - No known culture, that doesn’t use the pronoun „I“ — > conception of the self and personhood - Manner in which „I“ is used and what it means varies - Norbert Elias: concept of „I“ as a self-aware object is a modern western conception that emerged out of science and the Age of Reason - Not everyone shares the individualistic sense of uniqueness and self-consciousness that is common in western societies - Cultural repertoire of the self in the western world - We have a true self - We possess an identity that can become known to us - Identity is expressed through forms of representation - Identity is recognizable by ourselves and by others - identity: essence that can be signified through different signs (taste, beliefs, attitudes) - Personal and social - Marks us at same and different from others - Best understood not as a fixed identity but as an emotionally charged discursive description of ourselves that is subject to change Essentialism and anti-essentialism - western search for identity thinks that there is a „thing“ to be feuds - Identity as a universal and timeless core of the self that we all possess - Persons have an essence of the self = identity - Fixed essence of femininity, masculinity ? - Has been argued that identity is cultural all the way down — > specific to certain times and places 1 von 6

- anti-essentialism: words are not taken as having referents with essential or universal qualities so that language makes rather than finds Self-identity as a project - Giddens: Self-identity constituted by the ability to sustain a narrative about the self - Includes capacity to build consistent feeling of continuity - Identity stories answer questions: what to do? How to act? Who to be? - Individual attempts to construct coherent identity narrative - Self-identity is not a distinctive trait or a collection of traits possessed by the individual - Self-identity is what we as persons think it is - Identity is not something we have, nor an entity or a thing to which we can point - Mode of thinking about ourselves - What we think we are changes from circumstance to circumstance in time and space - Identity as a project —> our creation; always in process - Identity project builds on - What we think we are now in the light of our past and present circumstances - What we think we would like to be, the trajectory of our hoped-for future Social identities - are constituted as individuals in a social process using socially shared materials - Socialization or acculturation - Without it we would not be persons as we understand that notion in our everyday lives - Without language —> concept of personhood and identity would be unintelligible to us - Cultural studies: identity social and cultural, with no transcendental or ahistorical elements - Notion of what it Is to be a person —> cultural question - Resources that form material for an identity project (language, cultural practices) are social in character - What it means to be „someone“ is formed differently in different cultural contexts - Resources of an identity project are historically and culturally distinct - Matters whether we are black/white, male/female, rich/poor —> different cultural resources to which we will have had access - Identity matter of self-description and social ascription - Identity is about sameness and difference, about personal and the social, about what people have in common and what differentiates them from others The fracturing of identity The enlightenment subject - notion of persons as unique unified agents has been allied to that time - enlightenment: philosophical movement associated with idea that reason and rationality form basis for human progress - Subject was based on a conception of the human person as fully centered, unified individual - Capacities of reason, consciousness and action - Essential center of the self = identity - „Cartesian subject“ - I think therefore I am (Descartes) - Places rational conscious individual subject at the heart of western philosophy - Mind has inherent rational capacities - Allows us to experience world and make sense of it according to the actual properties of the world - Persons seen aus unified and capable of organizing themselves - Western morality: centrally concerned with questions of individual responsibility for actions - Embodied in laws that hold persons accountable for their actions - Autonomous self manifested in organization of academic knowledge into discrete subjects 2 von 6

- Economic theory has rational, self-interested, choice-making individual at its center The sociological subject - socialized self constituted through the processes of acculturation - Inner core of the subject no autonomous and self-sufficient, but formed in relation to significant others - Mediate values, meanings and symbols (culture) - First significant others: family members - Teach us through praise, punishment, imitation and language „how to go on“ in social life - Key assumption: people are social creatures - Social and individual constitute each other - Self conceived as possessing an inner unified core —> formed interactively between inner world and outside social world - Internalization of values and roles stabilizes individual and ensures that individual persons fits in The postmodern subject - intellectual movement towards sociological subject represents shift from describing persons as unified wholes who ground themselves, to regarding subject as socially formed - Social subject not source of itself —> is seen as having a „core self“, able to reflexively co-ordinate itself into a unity - Dezentere or postmodern self involves subject in shifting, fragmented and multiple identities - Persons composed of several, contradictory identities - Different identities at different times - Identities not unified around a coherent self - Identifications are continually being shifted about Social theory and the fractured subject The historical subject of Marxism - displaces any notion of a universal essence of personhood - „men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, […they do it] under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past“ - Historically specific mode of production and social relations constitutes subjects - Production of subjectivity located in a social formation of a definite time and place with specific characteristics - Feudal mode of production: - Based on the power of barons who own land and sets - Identities of barons and serfs are quite different —> from each other, but also from social relations and identities formed within a capitalist mode of production - What it is to be a certain „person“ is quite different because of the specific form of social organization of which they are a part - Could be held to be a simple sociological one, were it not for the significance he attributes to a reading of Marx, in which the place of ideology in the constitution of subjects is central - Subject formed in ideology is not a unified Cartesian subject but a shattered and fragmented one - Share certain common conditions of existence, but do not form a core, unified class consciousness - Cross-cut by conflicting interests and are formed and unformed in the course of time - Subjects are formed through difference as constituted by the play of signifiers - What we are is constituted by what we are not Psychoanalysis and subjectivity - Freud and the discovery of the unconscious through psychoanalysis - Psychoanalysis links „inside“ with the „outside“ - Stresses processes by which discursively constructed subject positions are taken up by concrete persons 3 von 6

- Achieved through fantasy identifications and emotional investments - Identities: points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us

- self is constituted in terms of an - ego: constituted rational mind - superego: social conscience - unconscious: source and repository of the symbolic working of the mind which functions with a -

different logic from reason Fractures unified Cartesian subject What we do and what we think are the outcome of the workings of the unconscious which is not available to the conscious mind in any straightforward fashion Unified narrative of the self is something we acquire over time —> through processes of identification with social discourses Great strength lies in its rejection of the fixed nature of subjects and sexuality Concentrates on the construction and formation of subjectivity Points us to the psychic and emotional aspects of identity through the concept of identification „inside“ is formed by the discourses that circulate on the „outside“ Little doubt about the significance of emotion in the constitution of subjectivity and identity Scientific procedures of psychoanalysis neither agreed nor empirically testable and repeatable - Should be treated as a set of poetic, metaphorical and mythological stories with consequences Historically specific way of understanding person that cannot be the basis for a universal theory Relies on linguistic and cultural processes that are deemed to be ahistorical and universal Alternative to psychoanalysis: social constructionism and/or discursive psychology that emphasizes language in the constitution of persons - Fundamental psychological notions can be approached through examination of a shared language - There are not things that are called emotions or attitudes that lurk behind language

Feminism and difference - plural field of theory and politics that is constituted by competing perspectives and prescriptions for action - Centrally concerned with sex as an organizing principle of social life that is saturated with power relations subordinating women to men - Practice of the „personal is political“ —> e..g domestic violence may occur in the private domain, but is of public concern and social casualty - Questions of how we are formed as sexed subjects in the context of gendered families - Explores how the inside of gender is formed by the outside of the family - What it is to be a person cannot be universal or unified —> identity is makes by sexual difference - Sex and gender are social and cultural constructions that are not reducible to biology - Femininity and masculinity: discursive constructions - Poststructuralist feminism is concerned with cultural construction of subjectivity per se and with a range of masculinities and femininities Language and identity - language is not a mirror that reflects an independent object world - Resource that lends form to ourselves and our world - identity: not a fixed, eternal thing —> regulated way of speaking about persons - Idea that identities are discursive constructions - Signifiers generate meaning not in relation to fixed objects but in relation to other signifiers - Meaning generated through relations of difference - Relationship between sounds and marks of language (signifiers) and what they are taken to mean (signifieds) not in an fixed, eternal relationship - Not possible to escape language in order to be able to view an independent object world directly 4 von 6

- Cannot attain a god-like vantage point from which to view the relationship between language and the world

- Meaning is unstable and constantly slides away - „differánce“ (difference and deferral) - View of language has important consequences for understanding the self and identity - language and thinking constitute the „I“ —> one cannot have an identity; but one is constituted through language as a series of discourse

- Language brings the self into being - Descartes famous phrase „I think, therefore I am“ becomes problematic - Suggests that thinking is separate from and represents the pre-existent I - But: since there is no „I“ outside of language, then thinking is being - „I“ is a position in language - Language generates meanings through a series of unstable and relational differences - Regulated pithing discourses that define, construct and produce their objects of knowledge - identities: discursive constructions that are both unstable and temporarily stabilized by social practice and regular, predictable The Foucauldian subject - said to have produced a „genealogy of the modern subject“ - Has traced the derivation and lineage of subject in and through history - Subject historicized: wholly and only the product of history - Subjectivity is a discursive production - Discourse enables speaking persons to come into existence - Offers us subject positions from which we make sense of the world - Subject position: perspective of set of regulated discursive meanings from which discourse makes sense - Speaking = taking up a pre-existent subject position and being subjected to the regulatory power of that discourse - Subject = product of power which individualizes those subject to it - Power ≠ negative mechanism of control —> but: productive of the self - power of school, work organization, prison, asylum produce subjectivity by bringing individuals into view - Genealogy’s task is to expose the body totally imprinted by history and the processes of history’s destruction of the body - Body = site of disciplinary practices which bring subjects into being - Practices as consequences of historical discourses - Three disciplinary discourses - The sciences: constitute the subject as an object of enquiry - Technologies of the self: individuals turn themselves into subjects - Dividing practices: separate the mad from the insane, criminal from the law-abiding citizen,… - Disciplinary technologies arose in a variety of sites —> produce „docile bodies“ that could be „subjected, used, transformed and improved“ - Discipline involves organization of the subject in space through dividing practices, trainings - Brings together knowledge, power and control - Produces subjects by categorizing and naming them in a hierarchical order - Rationality of efficiency, productivity and normalization - We are produced and classified as particular kinds of people - Discourses of disciplinary power can be traced historically - Subject seen as a historically specific production of discourse with no transcendental continuity from one subject position to another - Anti-essentialist position

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The articulated self - cumulative effect of above mentioned theories is to deconstruct the essentialist notion of the unified agent - Subject who possesses a fixed identity as a referent for the pronoun „i“ - Anti-essentialist conceptions stress the decentered subject: self made up of multiple and changeable identities Anti-essentialism and cultural identity - hall has usefully summarized essentialist and anti-essentialist positions from which cultural identity can be understood - Essential version: identity = name for a collective one true self - Formed out of a common history, ancestry and set of symbolic resources - Underlying assumptions of a certain view are that a collective identity exists, that it is a whole expressed through symbolic representations - Anti-essentialist position: stresses that as well as points of similarity, cultural identity is organized around points of difference - Cultural identity not a reflection of a fixed, natural state of being but as a process of becoming - No essence of identity to be discovered - Cultural identity is continually being produced within the vectors of similarity and difference - Identity often becomes a „cut“ or a snapshot of unfolding meanings - Strategic positioning which makes meaning possible - Anti-essentialist position does not mean that we cannot speak of identity - Point us to political nature of identity as a production - Directs us to the possibility of multiple, shifting and fragmented identities that can be articulated together The articulation of identities - Laclau: argues that there are no links between discursive concepts - Connections that are forged are temporary - Articulated and bound together by connotative or evocative links that have been established by power and tradition - Concept of articulation suggests that those aspects of social life can be thought of as the unique, historically specific, temporary stabilization or arbitrary closure of meaning - Articulation is a connection that can make a unity of two elements under certain conditions - „unity“ is replay articulation of different and distinct elements that under other historical and cultural circumstances they are articulated in a different way - Individuals are unique, historically specific, articulation of discursive elements - Socially determined or regulated - No automatic connection between various discourses of identity, class, gender, race, age

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