Issues of Subjectivity and Identity COMM301 Cultural Studies Issues of Subjectivity and Identity

Subjectivity The condition of being a person and the process by which we become a person: The ways in which we are constructed as subjects (biologically and culturally) The ways in which we experience ourselves (including the indescribable)

Self-Identity The verbal conceptions we hold abaout ourselves and our emotional identification with those self-descriptions

Social Identity The expectations and opions that other have of us

Personhood as a cultural production Identities are social constructions and cannot exist outside cultural representations They are the results of acculturation ‘I’ as a self-aware object is a modern western conception that emerged out of science and ‘Age of Reason’. This assumes that 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 ourself and by others

Identity can be signified through signs of taste, beliefs, attitudes and lifestyles. It can be personal and cultural. It marks us out as the same and different from other kinds of people Identity is either something we possess or a fixed thing to be found

Essentialism and anti-essentialism In the western thought, the identity exists as a universal and timeless core of the self that we all possess. Essentialism assumes that descriptions of ourselves reflect an essential underlying identity So there would be fixed essence of femininity, masculinity, nationality etc.

In contrast, it has been argued that identity is specific to particular tiem and places. Forms of identity are changable and related to definite social and cultural conjuctures. The idea that identity is plastic is referred as anti-essentialism.

Self-identity as a project Giddens argues that self-identity is constituted by the ability to sustain a narrative about the self. Identity stories tries to answer the critical questions: What to do? How to act? Who to be?

Self-ientity is not a distinctive trait or even a collection of traits, possessed by the individual. It is the self reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography. Self-identity is what we as person think it is. Identity is not something that we have. Of course, what we think we are changes from circumstance to circumstance in time and space. Giddens describes identity as a project, a moving towards rather than an arrival.

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 Self-identity is a sociological truism that we are born into a world pre-exists us. (The language we learn was in use before us) What it means to be a woman, a child, an Asian is formed differently in different social and cultural contexts Identity is not only a matter of self-description but also a social description

Fracturing of Identity Stuart Hall identified three different ways of conceptualizing identity: The enlightment subject The sociological subject The postmodern subject

The enlightment subject The enlightment is a philosophical movement associated with the idea that reason and rationality form the basis for human progress. The enlightment subject is a person who is a fully centred, unified individual with capacities of reason, consciousness and action. (Hall, 1992) “I think, therefore I am”: (Descartes)

The sociological subject Identities are not self- generating or internal of the self but are cultural. Our first significant others are likely to be our family members. From them we learn, through praise, punisment, imitation and language

The postmoden subject The intellectual movement from the enlightenment subject to the sociological subject represents a shift from decribing persons as unified wholes who ground themselves, to regarding the subject as socailly formed. The social subject is not the source of itself. The decentred or postmodern self involves the subject in shifting, fragmented and multiple identities. Persons are composed not one but of several, sometimes contradictory identities.