Class 2- Art and Identity- Dealing with Terminology

Terminology/Notes on two Readings
Hall, Stuart, "Who needs 'Identity'?" in Questions of Cultural Identity

Notes of Importance for Class Reading

“Who needs “Identity””?

· 2 ways to respond to who needs identity

· Identity is such a concept-operating ‘under erasure’ in the interval between reversal and emergence; an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all

· Where, in relation to what set of problems does the irreducibility of the concept, identity emerge?

· Idenitifcation-process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination or lack but is always too much or too little an over-determination or lack, but never a proper fit, a totality.

Introduction to Identity as a Question

· Identity difficult term

· Only when it is being threatened-identity crisis, unsure of self etc does identity become a question

· Book explains the troubles, and the sociological approach to the issues of identity

· Another disciplinary perspective on identity

What is Identity? Sameness and Difference

· Hinges on absurd combination of sameness and difference

· Idem (same) latin word

· Not only are we identical with ourselves (same from birth to death) but we are identical with others

· We share common identities

· “women” or men, Canadian, American, Black, White

· aspect of uniqueness allows people to be different