Identity as Simulacrum.

Simulacrum then...



...and now.

1. Michel Foucault (paraphrase) - Is ones "true self" (identity) really derived from ones sexuality? If so, to what degree? What other factors inform ones identity?

2. Douglas Kellner - "...Identity has been increasingly linked to style, to produce an image, to how one looks. It is as if everyone must have their own look, style, and image to have their own identity, though, paradoxically, many of the models of style and look come from consumer culture, thus individuality is highly mediated in the consumor society of the present."

3. Question - a. Where do images of identity within "consumer culture" originate? b. What is consumer culture?

4. Answer to a: Foucault - "...Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imposed by the Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse."

5. Meaning - "We" - individuals within a population - willingly submit the intimate details of our lives to the institutions of power (AKA "... Sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, and semiology [ect.]..." - Guy Debord). 6. Answer to b: Guy Debord - Consumer culture is the culture of the commodity AKA The Society of the Spectacle.
"...The world at once present and absent that the spectacle holds up to view is the world of the commodity dominating all living experience. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its development is identical to people’s estrangement from each other and from everything they produce."

7. Clarification - 1. "The Society of the Spectacle" is image/consumer culture within the economic system of global or late capitalism. 2. Identity, like everything else The Society of the Spectacle produces, is a commodity.

8. Application to Kellner - Kellner differentiates between the modern identity, "...An innate essence which determines what I am..." and postmodern identity, "...that identity is constructed not given, that it is a matter of choice, style, and behavior rather than intrinsic moral or psychological qualities... ...Postmodern identity, then, is constituted theatrically through role playing and image construction..."

9. Question - c.How do these two forms of identity relate to each-other?
Support for c. -Charlie Rose (to David Foster Wallace (41:53)) - "Quit worrying about how you are going to look and just be."
David Foster Wallace (45:16) - "I think postmodernism has run its course... A lot of the schticks of postmodernism - irony, cynicism, irreverence - are now part of whatever it is that's enervating in the culture itself. Burger-King now sells hamburgers with, "You've got to break the rules...""

10. Question (rhetorical) - How can one "just be" when one lives within The Society of the Spectacle?

11. Clarification - Postmodern identity is an image or role that one constructs and preforms. It is based on images or images of roles that one consumes within culture.

12. Jonathan Crary - "... the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a 'real,' optically perceived world...".
12a. What is Crary talking about? - The proliferation of digitally created imagery and environments that have never - and could never -exist in the real world (outside of an image).
12b. Why is this relevant?

13. Jean Baudrillard (from Simulacra and Simulation) - "...Today's abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that preceded the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory..."

14. If the digital images - advertising, photographs, movies, news, television, etc - that have become ubiquitous within our culture (AKA The society of the Spectacle) are overwhelmingly hyperreal (simulacra) and we construct our identities from images taken from culture, are our constructed identities simulacra as well?
14a. What does this mean?
14b. What is the consequence of this?

15. Answer to a and b: Foucault - explains biopower as, "... An explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations..."
15a. Interpretation - The postmodern identity as simulacrum is a a technique of power (here power is synonymous with "The spectacle") for achieving control of populations.

16. Is an identity simulacrum desirable?

I submit that it is not.

16a. To avoid the consumption of simulacrum - ergo, the creation of a simulacrum identity - one must consume imagery that is factual, original, and objective (or self critical). 16b. Rhetorical - How does the consumption of an image relate to an actual experience?

17. Question - What defines imagery that meets the above criteria?
17a. How does one create imagery that is factual, original, and objective (or self critical)?

18. Potential formulae - 1. Lars von Trier - Dogme 98. 2. Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida. 3. Peter Beste - Literary photojournalism.