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Well I certainly understand that "self" and "identity" are two different things they way you describe in that paragraph, but while they are different things they still seem, to some degree, inseparable if one is a normal member of their society and interacts with other people. I'm not sure that a "pure" self that's "just you" without any of the you that comes from how your society responds not only to your personality but to your gender, ethnicity, age, occupation, manner of dress, etc. is possible to really observe, let alone portray in fiction - especially since all of that ends up impacting the self anyway (unless you are some kind of hermit I guess). Unless I'm also just not getting the concept..
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Jun 26, 2015 15:38
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I think he is arguing that there is a platonic ideal of identity that each person strives towards but does not embody. That to be Japanese, to use his example, is to strive for an idea of inherent Japaneseness that is ethereal and thus unobtainable. This identity is forged from an outwards social force that all members within are expected to follow. He is then trying to argue that meditations on identity should be about the difference between self and cultural ideal, not about being the cultural ideal. The problem is that I think his fundamental premise of identity as social construct is wrong.
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Jun 26, 2015 16:23
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I think he is arguing that there is a platonic ideal of identity that each person strives towards but does not embody. That to be Japanese, to use his example, is to strive for an idea of inherent Japaneseness that is ethereal and thus unobtainable. This identity is forged from an outwards social force that all members within are expected to follow. He is then trying to argue that meditations on identity should be about the difference between self and cultural ideal, not about being the cultural ideal. I also got that but wasn't sure if it was just because I reallyt recently finished The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner, which basically argues what you're saying about Japaneseness, but about loads of things, most importantly, the Liberal concept of "man". That's a good book. In what way do you think identity is not a social construct? Surely something like "being Japanese" only exists in relation to the social and historical group "Japanese people" which you identify as part of.
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Jun 26, 2015 16:34
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CestMoi posted:In what way do you think identity is not a social construct? Surely something like "being Japanese" only exists in relation to the social and historical group "Japanese people" which you identify as part of. Yeah I didn't explain that well. I meant that identity obviously has a social factor, but I don't think it can be argued that there is a self separable from those influences. We are wholly a construction of social influences, and I do not think it can be argued that our self exists outside those influences. I completely reject his argument that subjectivity lies between self and identity. Subjectivity is the way that identity constructs the self.
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Jun 26, 2015 16:41
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Mel Mudkiper posted:his fundamental premise of identity as social construct is wrong. Mel Mudkiper posted:I don't think it can be argued that there is a self separable from those influences. We are wholly a construction of social influences, and I do not think it can be argued that our self exists outside those influences. I completely reject his argument that subjectivity lies between self and identity. Subjectivity is the way that identity constructs the self. What is the difference between identity and self? Identity= how I consciously identify myself? Self= who I am as a whole, consciously and unconciously?
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Jun 26, 2015 16:51
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blue squares posted:What is the difference between identity and self? My understanding: your identity does not come entirely from you. You can chose to identify yourself in a certain way, but the surrounding culture you are in will also have a big impact on your identity, and there are elements of it you can't control. Unless you entirely divorce yourself from society and live like a hermit. But in general if you are living in a human society people are going to put you into different boxes based on various external traits like ethnicity, surname, appearance, etc. Like personally I have a Jewish surname and "look Jewish" so even if I don't personally choose to identify myself that way, it still has an impact on my identity because that stuff is still a signifier of various things to the people in culture I live in. It's not something you can have complete control over. Whereas your "self" is the pure individual that you are. However I do not think it can be divorced from the above.
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Jun 26, 2015 17:03
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Earwicker posted:Whereas your "self" is the pure individual that you are. However I do not think it can be divorced from the above. Thats pretty much where I stand. The idea that there is a pure "self" separable from subject positioning seems a little idealistic for me.
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Jun 26, 2015 17:21
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So if I were a character, my Identity would be all the adjectives that you could use to describe me and my place in society, and my self would be how i behave, the deep down root of it all underneath the surface?
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Jun 26, 2015 17:25
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blue squares posted:So if I were a character, my Identity would be all the adjectives that you could use to describe me and my place in society, and my self would be how i behave, the deep down root of it all underneath the surface? Based on what Shibawanko seems to be arguing. I think most of us feel that there isn't a legitimate boundary between those two ideas.
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Jun 26, 2015 17:27
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Decenter the subject fam
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Jun 26, 2015 17:32
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blue squares posted:So if I were a character, my Identity would be all the adjectives that you could use to describe me and my place in society Not so much all the adjectives that can be used, its more that the most common and powerful of those and which are used the most frequently - and especially those used by groups who dominate a given culture - are those which impact your identity. So for example, a trait like skin color is likely to have a more powerful impact on your identity than eye or hair color, because we consider skin color a stronger marker of ethnicity or race and it plays a more important role in society in general. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Jun 26, 2015 |
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Jun 26, 2015 18:06
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My favorite african writer is albert camus
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Jun 27, 2015 16:04
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 My new to-read pile. I figure I'll start with the tunnel and go from there. Top book is All Quiet.
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Jun 27, 2015 19:19
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Stravinsky posted:My favorite african writer is albert camus Naguib Mahfouz is pretty good too.
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Jun 27, 2015 19:20
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Stravinsky posted:My favorite african writer is albert camus Mine's Pushkin.
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Jun 27, 2015 19:33
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The Tunnel is great. Also wow, I didn't realize how much Calvino got translated into English last year.
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Jun 27, 2015 21:36
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I really like that fuge chapter of the tunnel... the rest, I'm just OK with.
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Jun 27, 2015 22:24
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You know, I usually like gigantic post-modern tomes, but The Tunnel did nothing for me. Something about it just turned me off.
Popular Human fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Jun 28, 2015 |
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Jun 28, 2015 15:08
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blue squares posted:So if I were a character, my Identity would be all the adjectives that you could use to describe me and my place in society, and my self would be how i behave, the deep down root of it all underneath the surface? Identity, in the way it's usually talked about (especially by postcolonial theorists in this purely cultural, "authentic" way) is the Lacanian symbolic, the set of signifiers you are born into and are a part of you. Subjectivity is the Real of the inconsistencies in the Symbolic and your attempts to mediate them. Which doesn't mean that you should aggressively discard your identity either ("the escape from bourgeois life is itself bourgeois"), just that you cannot as a human being exist as a consistent identity without feeling somehow uneasy, and you will always experience some degree of alienation from what others tell you that you are. It's these feelings which make us produce art at all. And any attempt to return to some perceived earlier wholesomeness are illusory, sentimental feelings, equivalent to wanting to return to the womb. There was nothing particularly "wholesome" about Indian or African identity before colonization, it was more or less a chaotic, premodern mess with its own evils. Intelligent writers living in postcolonial societies (Fanon, Coetzee) always explicitly reject any return to an imagined past like that. What I said was a bit hyperbolic but there are many postcolonial writers who really do want, like, a return to caste society or Maori warrior tribes or whatever. But I guess I sound like a huge bore now, ugh.
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Jun 29, 2015 15:41
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Shibawanko posted:But I guess I sound like a huge bore now, ugh. More like schizophrenic/dilettante
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Jun 29, 2015 16:11
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Mel Mudkiper posted:More like schizophrenic/dilettante That's just mean.
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Jun 29, 2015 16:14
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Shibawanko posted:That's just mean. Try to rephrase it while toning down the Derridean scrawl
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Jun 29, 2015 16:19
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Also you should name these writers who want to return to tribal society because I still have not read one.
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Jun 29, 2015 16:34
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Try to rephrase it while toning down the Derridean scrawl uhhh yeah why don't you stop being so *looks up postmodernism on wikipedia* foucaulty
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Jun 29, 2015 17:27
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I was probably being too big of a prick but we already had a page trying to disentangle his last post and then drops another one like that on us. I get the desire to replicate the masters but this is a forum and a bit of concision would be nice.
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Jun 29, 2015 17:36
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i mean, there always are ppl who look to some imagined golden age to go back to, and when you're setting up a new nation and looking to construe your narrative its ghost might seem very alluring to a lot of ppl (and god knows we had & still have a lot of them in latvia). there also might be novelists trying to capitalise on this sentiment and produce pandering work about sexy maori girls living in desert or whatever, but i really think it's a stretch to insist it's mainstream in postcolonial lit, especially Real Literature. if anything, i'd say thatthe refusal to prescribe simple recipes to the problems of life the book is dealing with is a good sign that you're reading Real Literature For loving Adults.
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Jun 29, 2015 17:57
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Your identity is self contradictory because it includes a lot of different people's expectations of who you should be. The antagonism between the different things you feel you should be is a source of disocmfort and alienation. Advocating any one identity over any other is bad, because of the contradictions inherent in any identity. You should be your self. YOLO.
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Jun 29, 2015 17:58
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I would like to read the book about sexy Maori girls living in a desert, please.
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Jun 29, 2015 18:00
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CestMoi posted:I would like to read the book about sexy Maori girls living in a desert, please. i think the book shibawanko (Once Were Warriors) mentioned as an example was something like that. it was runner-up for Goodman Fielder Wattie Award!
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Jun 29, 2015 18:09
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Also you should name these writers who want to return to tribal society because I still have not read one. It's me I want to live in a tribe
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Jun 29, 2015 18:45
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CestMoi posted:I would like to read the book about sexy Maori girls living in a desert, please. Mad Max: Fury Road
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Jun 29, 2015 19:03
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Nanomashoes posted:
https://twitter.com/JoyceCarolOates/status/608300696073576448
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Jun 29, 2015 22:47
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The best part is how nobody understands that she is joking.
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Jun 30, 2015 00:13
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Grizzled Patriarch posted:The best part is how nobody understands that she is joking. "joking"
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Jun 30, 2015 00:21
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Oates retweets goofy poo poo like that all the time, and even seems to keep reasonably up-to-date with pop culture. I think it is fair to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she probably knows what Jurassic Park and / or a dinosaur are.
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Jun 30, 2015 00:29
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Oates also seems outright unbalanced and once tweeted that the people deriding Roman Polanski for being a child rapist were hypocrites because they probably enjoyed Nabokov's Lolita, so I dunno if that particular hill is one I want to die on
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Jun 30, 2015 01:25
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I mean it would be funny if she were serious, but I'm pretty sure anyone with a non-single-digit IQ knows there aren't 10-ton triceratops being hunted for sport. I don't know much about Oates beyond her writing, and defending Polanski is pretty lovely, but it just seems like a tongue-in-cheek joke to me.
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Jun 30, 2015 01:38
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My only problem with the "its a joke" explanation is that there wasn't a joke. If she had said, "hunting like this could easily lead to extinction" or something that would be a joke. She sounded legit mad. I don't think she honestly looked very closely at the picture and assumed it was a rhino or something.
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Jun 30, 2015 01:43
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Yeah, that makes sense, actually. I just figured it was one of those deadpan ironic things.
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Jun 30, 2015 01:51
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End Of Worlds posted:Oates also seems outright unbalanced and once tweeted that the people deriding Roman Polanski for being a child rapist were hypocrites because they probably enjoyed Nabokov's Lolita, so I dunno if that particular hill is one I want to die on What's wrong with this?
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Jun 30, 2015 02:54
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