SUBJECTIVITY

AND

IDENTITY

Novelistic and film plot:

Bildung – the protagonist searching for her selfhood

(orphan, foundling hero: Fielding, Dickens)

End of story: achieving selfhood (knowing who you are)

The idea of “renaissance man”

Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things” (homo mensura)

- Harmonious individual of many talents

- Master of himself

- Leon Batista Alberti: “A man can do all things if he wants”

- Fully trained (cultivated) – role of education

subjectivity in the film Renaissance Man

• Identity problems (double D-s and Rago)

• Two castings

• Two approaches to selfhood: Bill vs army

• Humanist vs collectivist

• Identity as individual difference or as belonging to a group

“This, above all, to thine own self be true” (Polonius) -- “Be all you can be” (Army poster)

• dummy in the classroom

• Victory tower scene

• Rap scene

• Sacrifice of Hobbs

• Excursion to Canada: theatre

Henry V (on stage)“For there is none of you so mean and baseThat hath no noble lustre in your eyes.Follow your spirit; and, upon this chargeCry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’”

„Mert köztetek senki sem oly alantas,Hogy nemes fény ne égne a szemében.Úgy álltok, mint pórázon agarak.Előttetek a vad, kiáltsátok oda:‘Harryval Isten, Szent György, Anglia!’”

• The army is no longer the opposite of ‘Shakespeare’

• Solidarity

• group identity helps everyone attain his/her own identity

• Exam: „You are not dumb. But I want you to know that”

• Benitez’s performance: „you”→”us”

Henry V (Benitez in the rain)“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;For he to-day that sheds his blood with meShall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile This day shall gentle his condition:And gentlemen in England now a-bedShall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaksThat fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

„Mi kevesek, mi boldog kevesek,Mi testvérbanda mert aki ma vérét Ontja velem, testvérem lesz; akármiAlantas, helyzetét megnemesíti E mai nap; s majd sok úriember, Aki ágyban hever most Angliában, Átoknak érzi, hogy nem volt ma itt,És szégyennek, ha olyan férfi szól,Ki itt harcolt Crispin napján velünk.” (IV.iii, Mészöly Dezső ford.)

• Examination: military event

• Melvyn: the soldier and the student survive

• Army: grants identity through identification

(no family context)

Modern Western subjectivityself, identity, in-dividual

• Thomas Reid (Scottish philosopher): “All mankind place their personality in something that cannot be divided … A person is something indivisible… My personal identity implies the continued existence of the indivisible thing which I call myself”

The subject as the centre of Enlightenment

• Descartes: cogito ergo sum

• John Locke: identity =

(1) self-reflection

(2) Continuity in time

DECENTRING THE SUBJECT

• De-centring: (1) removal from the centre

(2) losing one’s centre

(forces outside and within)

• 1. Psychoanalysis (inside forces)

• 2. Subjectivity and language (outside)

• 3. Subjectivity, power, ideology

PSYCHOANALYSIS(internal decentring)

• Clinical practice, therapy + theory

• Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan

Psychoanalysis 2• „What could be closer to me than my own

self?” (St. Augustine)

• Psa: Part of what goes on in my mind is not conscious

• Symptoms, dreams: alien yet mine

• I can’t control it; I can’t even know it

• ‘mental’ vs. ‘conscious’

the Unconscious

The mind: mysterious, dark place

Psychoanalysis 3: the subject

• Descartes: thinking subject, no past/history

• Psa: birth and history of the subject

• We all begin as babies with basic bodily and psychic needs (food, attention, love)

• Then we ‘acquire’ selfhood

The mirror stage (Jacques Lacan)

Psychoanalysis 4

• Jacques Lacan: the mirror stage (tükörstádium)

• 6-18 months: uncertain, uncoordinated body (unfinished)

• Identification with an imaginary image of fullness:

• Iste ego sum (‘I am that’): split

Caravaggio: Narcissus: Iste ego sum

Psychoanalysis 5: the subject

the subject exists only in relation to the Other: I need the other to tell me what I am

Marx: “Paul is not born with a mirror, he needs Peter to tell him who he is”

Bakhtin: “It is only when my life is told to another person that I myself become its hero.”

Decentring the subject/2:

Language and subjectivity(the HumptyDumpty problem)

Subject and language• Words: repeatable →never completely mine • (don’t name my special position and needs)

• Hegel: „language is able to express only what is general. Thus, I cannot give voice to what is purely my opinion. In the same way, if I say I, I mean myself as an entity that excludes everybody else, yet, what I actually say, I, is everybody. I is everybody else, too.”

Humpty

Dumpty

(in Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass)

“My name is Alice, but —”‘It’s a stupid name enough!’ Humpty Dumpty interrupted

impatiently. ‘What does it mean?’‘Must a name mean something?’ Alice asked doubtfully.‘Of course it must,’ Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh:

‘my name means the shape I am — and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.’

“‘I don’t know what you mean by glory,’ Alice said.Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you

don’t — till I tell you. I meant there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’

‘But glory doesn’t mean a nice knock-down argument,’ Alice objected.

‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make your words mean so many different things’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master that’s all’”

A nyelvi megelőzöttség tapasztalata

• When we appear, language is already there

• Haheperrenesheb (Egypt): „I wish I had sentences not yet known, unique sayings, brand new words never heard before, free of repetitions, phrases that have not come from my ancestors... For everything that has been said is but repetition, and nothing is said but that which has already been said”

“The being I refer to as me came into the world on Monday, June 8, 1903, at about eight in the morning, in Brussels”

(Marguerite Yourcenar: Dear Departed )

Anecdote of the Guayaki tribe

3. Decentring the subject/3: power, ideology, subjectivity

Person(a)

Little Red Riding-Hood (Charles Perrault)

She went to the bed and drew back the curtains. There lay her grandmother with her cap pulled far over her face, and looking very strange.

'Oh! grandmother,' she said, 'what big ears you have!''All the better to hear you with, my child,' was the reply.'But, grandmother, what big eyes you have!' she said.'All the better to see you with, my dear.''But, grandmother, what large hands you have!''All the better to hug you with.''Oh! but, grandmother, what a terrible big mouth you have!''All the better to eat you with!'And scarcely had the wolf said this, than with one bound he

was out of bed and swallowed up Red Riding Hood.When the wolf had appeased his appetite, he lay down again

in the bed, fell asleep and began to snore very loud.

Identity, identities– identity positions, subject positions

(family, race, class, nation, religion, sex)

Subjectivity: a set of identities

We construct ourselves, take up (imitate) positions: parenst, friends, characters

Don Quijote, Madame Bovary

(Woody Allen’s Zelig: imitative subject)

unique, autonomous subject

IDENTITY /1

(1) collective (identity with sg - sense of ‘us’)

(2) defined against the ‘other’

(us – them, Self – Other)

‘standard’ self (unmarked)

Breyten Breytenbach (white South African poet): The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist

IDENTITY /2

(3) identity through time

Narratives of identity, self-stories

Forgetting things (Cseres Tibor: Hideg napok)

(4) Implicated in power and ideology (family, school, church etc.)

National identity/1• a modern invention (19th cent.)• + anti-colonial independence movements• (resistance in national terms: Western

import, eg Indian Congress Party) • Aztec, Inca culture mixed with nationalist

rhetoric• Nation: political category (citizens) • Reinventing themselves as natural, organic• Germany and C-E Europe: ‘tribal’

nationalism• (Blut und Boden)

National identity/2 Symbols (flag, coat of arms, totemic animals)

sites of memory

narratives (histories, myths: need for origins)

rituals

heroes (and enemies)

national characteristics (Goethe: Völkergeist),

National identity

inventing the past

e.g. Scottish Highland myth: lowly barbarians – subsequently romanticised by Walter Scott and others (kilt, tartan, clans)

Origins, uniqueness (chosen nation, manifest destiny), mission

the “glue” of imagined communities

Identity and ‘literature’

• Patriotic poetry

• Nature poetry

• Love poetry

Love poetry and gender

Lover: male – object: female

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (19th cent)

Yet: Sappho (first Eur. love poet)

oarystis (feminine mode of coy, playful lang)

Love poetry: wooing – before consummation

Male poetry of yearning: originally homoerotic

Gender and sexual identity

SEX: male/female (biological)

GENDER: masculine/feminine (social)

Freud: “Anatomy is destiny”

Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born but rather becomes a woman”

(story of Iphis, Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory)

Sex and gender

Gender identity: sg we ‘do’ rather than sg we ‘are’ („a férfi legyen férfi”)

Gender breaks down into a series of acts, gestures that are performed to scripts

Sex and gender

Women: excluded from the creation of the symbolic world → objects of representation

Man: mind – Woman: bodyVictory (Nike) Truth (veiled woman) Wisdom (Spohia, Pallas Athene, Minerva) Justice Mother nature

Sex and gender

Women: ould not even represent themselves

(~ Lialloon, Friday)

authorial identity: male

(women: letters, diaries, novel – not poetry)

Modernity: women equal citizens

‘symbolically’ still inferior

„women exist to be looked at” (John Berger)

“The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she wasmade of flesh and blood. O my America, my new found land.She embarked on a tranced voyage, exploring the whole ofherself, clambering her own mountain ranges, penetrating themoist richness of her secret valleys, a physiological Cortez, da

Gama or Mungo Park. For hours she stared at herself, naked, in the mirror of her wardrobe. … She also posed in attitudes, holding things. Pre-Raphaelite, she combed out her long, black hair to stream straight down ...and thoughtfully regarded herself as she held a tiger-lily from the garden under her chin, her knees pressed close together. A la Toulouse Lautrec, she dragged her hair sluttishly across her face and sat down in a chair with her legs apart and a bowl of water and a towel at her feet. … Further, she used the net curtain as raw material for a series of nightgowns suitable for her wedding-night... She gift-wrapped herself for a phantom bridegroom.” (Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop)

from John Donne: ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’

• „Licence my roving hands, and let them go,   • Before, behind, between, above, below.• O my America! my new-found-land,• My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,• My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,• How blest am I in this discovering thee!• To enter in these bonds, is to be free;• Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.•     Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,• As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,• To taste whole joys.”

Pre-Raphaelite woman

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

Proserpina)

Pre-Raphaelite women (Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

“The most erogenous part of my body is my belly button. I have the most perfect belly button. When I stick a finger in my belly button I feel a nerve in the centre of my body shoot up my spine. If 100 belly buttons were lined up against a wall I would definitely pick out which one was mine”

Identity/subjectivity as spectacle,

performance