Introduction to _Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital_

Handbook of Research on Technoself

Human identity, whether individual or collective, has always been conditioned by the mode(s) of communication dominant within any given society. Even in ancient times, the character of civilizations was closely linked to their affinity with particular media. However, self-identity remained largely coextensive with social interaction at the community level, and the oral transmission of knowledge. Throughout the modern period, social identity became increasingly abstracted from its original foundations in localized community and direct experience. The corresponding developments in media technologies have arguably empowered the individual subject, allowing for greater self-expression and social/political engagement. However, these technologies also enable new forms of social control. Digital media now facilitate the construction of identity outside the awareness of individuals. A present challenge is to clarify how identity, subjectivity, and agency are to be meaningfully conceived in ...

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2012

This paper aims to demonstrate how intersectionality provides an important conceptual tool to analyse practices of cultural production in ethnic minority media. In the context of the digital age, media are increasingly central as systems of representation of identity, culture and community. However, research examining how ethnic minority media become engaged in struggles of power is rare. Few works have paid attention to the ways in which race and gender operate in tandem to produce and maintain the unequal distribution of power in the mediascape of countries of post-colonial immigration. This paper juxtaposes gender studies and ethnic studies in order to analyse the representation of gender in ethnic media, with a particular focus on journalistic practices.

Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, 2015

In spite of some resistance, the humanities-no longer in possession of the "social mission" that once characterised humanistic study (Summit 2012, 668)-are gradually changing into what Badmington (2006) calls the "posthumanities," a more socially relevant, interdisciplinary continuum of knowledge. In so doing, there seems to have been a rapprochement with other, more socially-oriented disciplines. It is precisely from this merger that new inter-or even anti-disciplines have risen, such as cultural, media and gender studies. Cultural studies is an area of interdisciplinary research which understands that cultural phenomena and their interpretation are mediated by such identity variables as class, gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality, to name but a few. Consequently, identity has been-and remains-central to cultural studies (Barker 1999, 2). Crucially, the centrality of this concept can also be observed within both gender and media studies. Gender studies is an equally interdisciplinary area that focuses on gender as a "structural phenomenon" that "is also produced, negotiated and sustained at the level of everyday interaction" (Jackson and Scott 2002, 1). Identity issues, therefore, are just as relevant within gender studies as they are within cultural and media studies-see Barker (1999) and Gauntlett (2008). Mapping Identity and Identification Processes. Approaches from Cultural Studies offers a selection of papers presented at the 14 th International IBACS Culture and Power Conference (University of Castilla-La Mancha, 2010), illustrating the centrality of identity and identification issues in current cultural research and critical theory. After an emotive preface by Lawrence Grossberg, the volume proper begins with an introduction by the editors. This clearly presents identity as a discursive formation, thus paying homage to Foucauldian theory, which has proved so influential in the field. Indeed, cultural, gender and media studies are all widely seen as strongholds of poststructuralist approaches. These have perhaps most visibly helped challenge influential binary oppositions including the very categories of self and other, and male and female.

2016

Qualitative Inquiry, 2004

Winner of the 2006 Roy C. Buck Award, honoring a tenure-track faculty member in the College of Arts and Architecture of The Pennsylvania State University for the best refereed article in a scholarly journal. Kenneth Gergen (1991) sees identity crises as endemic to the current human condition and has termed the malady “multiphrenia.” It is described as being symptomatic of nations with these particular traits of the postmodern era: a populace of multilocal people—people with attachments to more than one place or community, and with increasingly disconnected relationships; cosmopolitan communities with a plurality of cultures, including transplanted colonies from other lands; an explosion of information systems and a multi-media visual culture. Utilizing an autoethnographic framework, this essay examines my own identity crisis after the death of my father and, as reconstituted in this essay, my namesake. I will explore modernist, postmodernist, and poststructural methodologies available for the construction and reconstitution of our identity constructs in the current era.

The Migrant as an Eye/I. Transculturality, Self-Representation, Audiovisual Practices (Edited by Alice Cati and Mariagiulia Grassilli), 2019

In the context of cinema and visual arts, and contemporary installations and digital projects, there is a growing interest in the aesthetic transformation of images of identification and control, traditionally used in crime prevention, for military use, or as recognition techniques1 in the context of police and legal services. Some of the most renowned examples are artworks such as "Wanted: $2,000 Reward by Marcel Duchamp" (1963), and Andy Warhol’s "Thirteen Most Wanted Men" (1964). Borrowing some symbolic aspects of such procedures and technologies of identification,2 such as the double image taken from the front and in profile, the identikit, the fingerprint, and so on, numerous artists have recently reworked some of the same tropes to redefine the representation of the migrant, the refugee, the illegal citizen, the subject at the margins, or the outcast, not only critically reading the related stereotypes and formulas but also showing the violence that such technologies of identification inflict on the subject. From this perspective, it is interesting to analyse specific aesthetic procedures for representing the marginal subject, which are used when topology replaces autobiographical chronology. They range from the ironic staging of processes of identification ("Self Portrait", Jonas Mekas, 1980), to the accumulation of identity cards and passports in self-portraits to show how physical displacement is connected with emotional changes ("Daniel Isaac Spoerri-Feinstein", Daniel Spoerri 1977), to the theme of the commercialization of one’s own body in order to gain civil rights and citizenship or the issue of crossing physical boundaries (as in Tanja Ostojić’s "Looking for a Husband with an EU Passport, 2000−05", and "Illegal Border Crossing" 2000). Against this backdrop, this contribution will focus on the aesthetic use of identification and control techniques within a contemporary visual context: this is crucial not only for understanding the more recent forms of life-writing in the dialectic between Western and non-Western societies, but also for rethinking the notion of identity in a historical and cultural context that calls us to read self-representation in terms of notions such as body, gender, ethnicity, and displacement.

This article sets out to explore the question, what it is to live in the postmodern age as an 'individual', that is, as someone with a distinct sense of who she or he is. Consideration is given to the possibility that individuals today, in the context of globalization, may not have such a distinct sense of personal 'identity', as well as to the question, what it is to have an identity. These questions are explored in relation to the so-called postmodern subject – or the subject in the age of globalization, the age of hyper-communication, or of 'informatization' – which one may assume to be constituted very differently from the 'modern' subject of the 19 th-century, or even more radically differently from pre-modern subjects. One could say that what Hardt and Negri regard as distinctive for postmodernity – informatization, made possible by advanced communications technology – is inseparable from the 'identity' of postmodern individuals. Moreover, Derrida's insistence that the communications technology characteristic of an era embodies a change in subjectivity (and hence, in identity), points to a significant clue regarding the identity of postmodern subjects. The aim of the present article is therefore to explore what all of these divergent considerations mean with regard to the issue of identity in the contemporary world – whether one has reason to believe that identity has evaporated in the flux of postmodern life, or if some of the theoretical perspectives invoked here enable one to affirm the continued legitimacy of talking about identity today.

Jurnal ilmu kemanusiaan, 2016

This article examines the modes of objectification of a collective subject described as "Indian American", through the panoptic technologies of literature and cinema as utilised in the United States (US) in the aftermath of 9/11. Following the 2003 publication of the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake, Fox Searchlight Pictures released Mira Nair's cinematic adaptation in 2007. Published in the aftermath of the 9/11 event in the US, the story spans over three decades, telling of the diasporic experiences of a middle-class family of a minority culture, the Gangulis, from their immigration in the 1960s-which historically coincided with the rise of two contrasting social phenomena, Neoliberalism and the Oriental Other-to their present assimilated status into the mainstream American culture. We argue that the literary and cinematographic narratives of The Namesake are employed by the hegemonic state power to offer an antidote to the chronic insecurities unleashed by notions of both Neoliberalism and the Oriental Other. The study outlines the panoptic dimensions of both narratives and unpacks the way their visual, narrative and "characterological architectonics" correspond with what Michel Foucault calls "the carceral mechanisms of power". Novel and film thus act together to instantiate in the public the ideological interests of the capital which, in turn, mobilises the apparatus itself, doing so through narrative techniques that conscript the public into a unified scopic regime. In the diasporic world of The Namesake, as the article concludes, the individual difference is associated with social deviance, in a way that in society, the local subject and its individuality become a signifier of 138 Moussa Pourya Asl, Nurul Farhana Low Abdullah and Md Salleh Yaapar guilt, whereas, assimilation into global cultural pluralism is made synonymous with conformity and normativity.