Identity widely assumed to be inside the individual. Subject of language argues that identity is made up of various ‘subject’ positions and that these are offered (a menu?) via language and other cultural presentations. An individual is constituted as a subject by a process of  ‘interpellation’ or ‘suture’ meaning the unconscious mechanism that has the subject speak as if from some essentially individual position but in fact being ‘spoken by’ their subject positions in a culture.

So, individual is a subject inserted into the subject position of a culture.

False consciousness?

Louis Althusser, Lacan

Psychoanalytic

Also reject identity as inner essence. But also rejects the priority other two approaches give outside influences. Focus instead on the unconscious- fragmented but impacts and shapes human interaction. The unconscious – has its own effects – not reducible to affects of external world although shaped by it.

Klein

Genealogical

Rejects the ‘interior’ world of Block 2.  Social identity produced by specific social contexts. Unlike Block 1, not language but concrete practices which produce ‘types of personhood’.

Max weber, Foucault, Marcel Mauss, Bourdieu

Relative thickness and thinness of these approaches.

Thick = psychoanalytic

Thin = sociological

Subject of lang position is ambiguous – use of psychoanalysis and the unconscious mechanisms by which individuals are ‘inserted’ into subject positions in culture could be a ‘thick acct.

But Lacanian accts. as read in cultural studies, see the unconscious as a product of the subjects insertion into lang and culture – so a relatively thin acct. of identity.

This ambiguity at heart of the course,  Rapprochement – Stuart Hall 1996?

Driven by wider social change which have problematized identity categories

Shift in ideas –esp. ‘anti-essentialist’ critique of identity – critiques both:

    Cartesian (Descartes): identity as a directing consciousness

    Post-Darwinism: bio-chemical sub-stratum directing human behaviour

The anti –essentialist argument: no essence, identity as de-centred

Three anti-essentialist approaches covered in D853:

    Block 1 Subject of language dev from cultural /media studies 1970s and 80s – from structural Marxism of Althusser and psychoanalysis of Lacan.

Block 2 Psychoanalysis – derived from clinical context of British psychoanalysis – Klein and object relation schools

Block 3 Historical and sociological conceptualizations of identity – anti psychoanalytic explanations of any variant. Assoc. with Weber, Foucault, Mauss, and Bourdieu. A genealogical approach to identity formation.

Ooops! A huge box of reading material has arrived…

I’ll set up my new blog as displacement activity –