Ii
Identity
Ideology
Interpellation
IDENTITY
Concepts
of Collective Identity:
a) People band themselves together
imaginatively in groups; you may as a person have a number of
identities (national, gender, local/city, race) and different aspects
of your collective identity are important to you than others.
b)
Identity is therefore not fixed or given; this fights against dominant
Western notion of the fixed, autonomous self.
c) Identity is
constantly reconsituted and in constant flux; you are being
reconstituted as are the collectives you define yourself against.
Postmodernity
and Identity:
a) Modernity changed the sense of identity
through urban revolution.
b) In postmodernity, although the city
experience is still important, the mass media are more important in
changing sense of individual and cultural identity.
c) People who
are positive about postmodernism point to crushing of individual
identity in modern city design to show how postmodernity supposedly
brings back importance (this argument works best in
architecture).
d) Globalization
started as an economic phenomenon and ends as a phenomenom of
identity. (E.g., Scottish nationalists are lumped in with the problems
in Yugoslavia).
See also:
~~~~~~~~~~
IDENTITY, CRISIS OF
Crisis
of Identity: A poststructuralist
concept:
From 1960s onwards dominant structuralism began to be
replaced by micropolitics, lobby groups, localism, nationalism, etc.,
interms of group identity. The breakdown of the old order led to
crises of identity and representation, and a loss of old identities at
the collective level. So Jameson,
for example, argues that the subject in a postmodern world is not
alienated, but rather fragmented. "Alientation presumes a central,
unitary self . . . [b]ut if, as a postmodernist sees it, the self is
decentered and multiple, the cocept of alienation breaks down. All
that is left is the anxiety of identity" (Turkle, 1995: 49).
So how did
this happen?
1) Two things
were happening at the same time in the 1960s:
a) Lacan
begins writing about the decentered
self, attacking the notion of an embedded self.
b) Beginning of
the end of the dominant theory thesis and hegemony;
micropolitics arrives.
2) By
beginning of the 1970s, the question "Who am I?" becomes harder to
answer at both an individual and collective level.
3) By the
1970s-80s, you see the beginnings of new collectives being formed
(Yuppies, DINKies, etc.)
Now, we buy
things and consume our identity rather than experience, achieve or
learn. Consumer culture was around earlier but now its has
intensified.
How do you get
an authentic identity? Is it possible at all or is identity undercut
by postmodern phenomenon?
See also:
~~~~~~~~~~
IDEOLOGY
Ideology
is the broad structures governing societal control, within which
discourses are the tangible manifestations. As far as hegemony - the
willing acceptance of one social group's dominance and control by
another - is concerned, the word is often understood in terms of the
more complex view of social structure developed in recent years within
the Gramscian tradition, articulated by theorists such as Raymond
Williams and Stuart
Hall.
Ideology,
defined broadly in Marxist
terms as a "false consciousness" within a system of beliefs, is also a
useful concept to understand for the purposes of this paper. It can be
described as the broad structure governing societal control. John
Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies (London; New York:
Routledge, 1991), 172.
Fiske also
refers to Raymond Williams' articulation of the concept of ideology.
In Marxism and Literature (1977) Williams outlines three main
uses of the term:
- As a system
of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group
- As a system
of "illusory" beliefs--that is, a class of "false consciousness" or
false ideas--that can be contrasted with true or scientific
knowledge
- As the
general process of the production of meanings and ideas
(Fiske,
Introduction to Communication Studies.)
See
also:
~~~~~~~~~~
INTERPELLATION
Althusser's
term, aka "hailing", used to articulate power
relations between individuals and groups in society. He argued that
ideological state apparatuses 'hailed' persons
into certain subject positions (for example, as "middle class",
instead of the more revolutionary subject position of "working class";
as "black" instead of "white"; as "girl" instead of "man."). Hailing
is, in this sense, a kind of "invitation" that actually works to
situate people in a system of power -- specifically, to coerce them
(in non-apparent ways) into seeing themselves in particular ways.
For
example, the "Hey, you there!" of the policeman
constitutes the person addressed as a particular kind of
subject (a "suspect", perhaps) within a
particular structure of authority. Even though the person
addressed may be innocent of any crime, he still may feel guilt, as if
he had done something, simply by virtue of how he is reconstituted by
the policeman's hailing within a legal structure of authority. You
only need to compare this to another form of address the
policeman might adopt: "Excuse me, sir (or ma'am)"; here the subject
of the address is being interpellated in a very different way.
To take
the point further: if a white policeman addressed a black
man as "hey, boy!" the addressee would be placed as a
subject in a structure of authority that was most likely predicated on
a white power structure that placed blacks in an inferior position. If
a male policeman addressed an adult woman as "hey,
girlie!" or "Hey, doll!", that would suggest a patriarchal
power structure that placed women in an inferior position to men. (See
Louis Althusser. 1971, Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. by Ben
Brewster. London: Monthly Review Press.)
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USEFUL
EXTERNAL
LINKS
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None Entered Yet: Refer
to |
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Kiss's "Beyond"
section |
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for external
links |
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See also kiss links:
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CT.
Subject Index Ii
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