Seminar 3 - Identity.
Main points from the lecture:
- Psuedo science, identity is based on physical characteristics you are born with it and cannot escape it, It is your biological make up, this is a trait of essentialism. Eg. If you are born back you are less intelligent.
Identity and 'the other' in visual representation.
- Creation of identities
- Concepts of 'otherness'
- Analysis of visual example.
Identity: Who we are and how others perceive who we are.
What makes you, YOU? (Individual subjectivities - our sense of self)
Discuss in small groups:
- Interests and hobbies.
- Your job/ course you study.
- Being a student/ non student.
- Morals (What you believe in).
- People you surround yourself with (family, friends, peers).
- Nationality and regional. (Where you are from). ENVIRONMENT.
- Appearance, how you decide to dress.
- If you have money, and If so, how you deal with your money. (Spend or save).
- Marital status (Society sees people differently, divorce, widowed, single etc)
- Era you were born in.
- Diet. (Alters the way you look, overeat, under eat, affective of health.)
Peoples diets are commodified (M&S) Finer foods are bought as symbols of identity.
Affects us physically and socially, we have a better outlook on life, once we have had a good meal etc. We are sometimes grumpy when hungry.
Dialectic (Both physical and social effects)
- Education.
How do you express your identity?
- Social media.
- How you dress/ look.
- Music you listen to.
- Places you choose to go to hang out.
- The brands you choose to buy (food, clothes, items)
- Possessions fashion. Particularly in urban environments where people are more anonymous. Used as a barrier to stop people knowing exactly who you are. An 'artificial' performance of identity.
However people from a more wealthy background may se it as the 'norm' to wear these brands.
Social interactions - How you treat others.
Mannerisms - presenting yourself differently to people ( friends as a contrast to your boss)
- Interests and hobbies.
- Whom you associate yourself with.
Our subjectivities are given to us through our wider society, but also our self creation of who we choose to be.
Stuart Hall.
Our identity is not something innate, there may be innate factors that go towards our subjectivities. These 5 categories equally decipher our selves.
- Laws that limit how we exist, suppressed by legality, society limits our desires by a certain extent.
- What we buy, the way we act, our affections, our mannerisms.
- What you do in society, what you do for a job. The role that you have is ultimately part of your identity through choice or not.
The things that you buy are related to your role, for instance if you are a business man you are expected to but your house certain things. From a welfare point of view you have the funds to purchase what others do not etc.
It is not enough to describe our identities as something that we just express, or about our jobs or what we own, because it is all of these things in a complex multi determining shift and cycle. All 5 of these elements to our make up, combine to create the ultimate you.
Jacques LACAN.
- Working after Freud as a physcoanalyst.
- Worked after Freud.
- Came up with the otherness.
- Came up with the idea that when you are born you do not understand and do not have any comprehension that you are distinct or separate from your mother, through breast feeding etc you are semiotically linked. When you are born you are a 'hommelette' a scrambled mix of parts you don't understand. They do not understand the separation of themselves from anything else in the world.
In the mirror stage 6-18 months, first stages of identity, a baby looking at itself in the mirror and seeing for the first time externally a sense of itself as a cohesive being in the world. First sense of being an individual. Particularly occurs through things like giving out signals and noticing these things have a response. Crying and helping, hungry and food.
We gain a sense of who we are through the actions/ response of the outside world to the things that we do, this is how we know ourselves to be independent individual and isolated.
After 18 months a lot of our sense of identity is secured.
Not who we would like to be or who we think we are, it is formed by the reception of others.
But this sense of our own identity is fragile. It is illusionary, We believe we are a powerful unit making changes in the world, however this is not true because babies cannot live without others help.
All of our identity masquerades, link back to our mirror phase, we are individual and when we act the world responds.
All the rest of our actions (dress, act, strive for status - popularity) same process, trying to strive for stability and identity. Never one moment when we are entirely happy because we never have that stable identity.
In the mirror phase in order to secure our identity we have to measure our selves as subjects against objects, against what we are not, involves taking other people and simplifying what they are (I am black because I am not white, I am a man because I am not a woman) Taking a limited reading of what others are to reaffirm to ourselves what we are as individuals. Securing our sense of self.
EXAMPLES OF OTHERING:
- Brands: Not about buying a gucci watch to be part of that affluent world, having a gucci watch to know you are not one of the council estate underclass.
- Accent: If you have renounced pronunciation, you are saying you are part of an educating cast, not part of the general working class who communicate with slang. By trying to be this way, we are trying to seem more secure, assuming we are better.
In the lynx advert:
Not just about buying something to smell nice. More complex, stereotyping, pushing another sense of society away. Buy using this deodorant you attract lots of women and are therefore more masculine, if not you are like the 'others' who are less masculine.
Whole societies depend on this. On a social level, shoring up unstable identities through the illusion of unity. We have to invent new cases of othering to constantly feel stable.
A problem of the other, at least we are not like this, and we do not have these problems, we live rightly and live in a stable world. Looking away from the problem, we are distanced from people and these issues. Article about aids next to advert about a boots advantage card in a magazine.
Next weeks task:
Analyse one image from the media, newspaper story or advert, popular music press, or sub culture. For the audience of that image, secure an identity, by othering people. What the images promise you in terms of solidifying a sense of self, by reducing the other.
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