Well, as usual, I take objection to about half of the claims that the author makes. In this instance, the subject of *admiration* is Harvey. I don’t know if it is a function of the time this particular piece was written in, but his ideas seem oddly out of place. I guess I just don’t have an issue with society and these authors, being social critics, do. So here goes my critic of the critic:
On page 289, Harvey claims, “Insofar as identity is increasingly dependent upon images, this means that the serial and recursive replications of identities (individual, corporate, institutional, and political) becomes a very real possibility and problem.” I understand how this could be a problem for a car maker. Let’s say someone takes the Mercedes logo off of a Mercedes and throws it onto a Honda. That might confuse some people and tarnish Mercedes’ image in their minds. But to the extent that someone can replicate my individual identity is ludicrous. No one out there can be as funny, good looking, and charming as I am. Not to mention I don’t think I could identify myself through “images”. Mass production can make the extraordinary seem mundane; reproduction of images cannot steal one’s self identity.
Onto the next topic of today’s discourse, “the de-linking of the financial system from active production and from any material monetary base calls into question the reliability of the base mechanism whereby value is supposed to be represented.” (299) The financial crisis of the 80s coupled with Japan’s rise of economic power prompted many to speculate the end of US economic dominance and a fear of economic disaster. As we now know, the Japanese real estate bubble burst in the early 90s and the advent of the internet sent the American economy into uncharted heights. The American dollar is still the currency of the world and it derives its value from the very fact that other people want to hold it. It is linked to the success and stability of the American government and economy. It symbolizes everything America stands for in some respects. There must be some value in symbolizing a country, no?
Finally, “Place identity… becomes an important issue because everyone occupies a space of individuation… If no one ‘knows their place’ in the shifting collage world, then how can a secure social order be fashioned or sustained?”(302) I think Harvey short changes us by insinuating that we can only fit into one identity. The fact of the matter is no one fits into one “place”, but into a multitude of places. I am American, Italian, Croatian, a Yankee Fan, a Pomona Student, a music fan, an entrepreneur, and a student to name a few. My identity is a collage and I have no need to limit the number of identities I place on myself.
Bumpkins, I agree with you in the essence that images cannot define or replicate the core identity of you. However (yes, here's an "I-agree-with-you-but . . . "), couldn't you agree that there is some sort affinity you feel with the image of certain brands and images (like posters you might hang on your wall, etc.)? Are there not certain art pieces that strike you particularly deep? And to further make my point, do you not feel a certain likeness to someone who wears the same brands as you do/drives the same car as you/has the same posters on their wall/values the same artists???
I don't interpret Harvey to be saying "that someone can replicate [your or my] individual identity" through images, but rather that HOW we form our own identities is based much more on the consumption of images these days than it has been in a pre-image saturated era. For example, just look at Facebook and everything on a profile. It seems to me that much of a personal profile is about identification with images (favorite TV shows, favorite movies, and especially the posting and censorship of personal pictures).
I would propose a sliding scale of image identification on which people can fall with regards to how they feel they construct their indentity, because I certainly know people who DO take pride in their identity as being formed from their clothing/car/art/etc. amd the aura each image gives off to viewers (myself included at times and to various extents!).
I just don't think that my brand loyalty explains my soul. I wear American Eagle and Polo, drive a 97 honda accord, and watch baseball religiously. I definately get along with other people who watch baseball and listen to music, but I want to say that is because we have interests in the same subjects. I wouldn't dare go as far as to say that that person has the same self identity that I have. (I used "that" a lot in my last sentence).
I think I may be using a deeper sense of identity here than you and Harvey allude to. I am talking the person I am in the shower at 8am, that identity. My identity to others is relatively meaningless compared to how I view myself in the mirror every morning and that "mirror identity" is far more important than any identity I gain from wearing Yankees clothing.
Bumpkins, your disinclination to limit the number of identities you place on yourself is laudable, but also begs some important questions:
1) What about the identities placed on you, or on others, by extrinsic mechanisms of power and control? Someone like Althusser would probably emphasize the very delimitation of identity to which you're objecting, though her for him it would most likely be tied to larger institutions. This segues directly into the second question: 2) Why are some identities more acceptable in the mainstream than others? Normativity is rarely - I would even venture to say never - an historical accident. Subects in the postmodern capitalist world ostensibly "choose" their (always multiple) identities. However, consider the group of students who will be in Postmodernism tomorrow from 1:15-4. Speaking for myself, I can say honestly that going to class, doing my work on time, comporting myself professionally, in short, all the elements necessary for maintaining an "academic identity," were never really "options" - at least in the sense of full volition. The compulsion to stay docilely in my seat goes far beyond my own whim, which isn't to say that I dislike or resent my subject position; it simply problematizes the discourse of "free choices" by which we tend to understand agency and decision-making.
Also, you claim to "not be able to identify yourself through images." I wonder, though, what are your examples of identitarian categories, e.g. "Italian," "Pomona Student," "entrepreneur," etc. if not images - in Harvey's sense of identity categories that have become increasingly consumable in the postmodern period? I agree with es23 that Harvey's argument has more to do with self-identification and the extent to which it's driven by consumption than any claim about systems/corporations being able to basically clone people through the manipulation of images.
"What about the identities placed on you, or on others, by extrinsic mechanisms of power and control?"
Why don't comments like this from the authors strike anybody but me as strange? "extrinsic mechanisms of power and control"? It invokes the sentiments of the caveman from the Geico commercial: "What"?
Playing off of your example of coming prepared to school, no one makes you do anything you just listed. We can get into a philosophical debate of free will, but, assuming it exists, you don't have to do your homework and get to class on time. I skipped half of my EA reading today because I had to write a paper and try and get through over 80 pages of intense postmodernism homework and then post on the blog. The need to conform only goes so far; even if all the cool kids get to class on time, I don't have to.
In response to your second point, I was trying to convey the idea that those images are meaningless compared to some overalls sense of self. I mentioned what kind of self identity I am trying to communicate in my response to es's comment. Its a non-material identity that I see when I look in the mirror in the morning, which, I believe, is far more important than any identity "placed on me by extrinsic mechanisms of power and control".
My claim is that in the socio-cultural landscape of late capitalism it becomes impossible to differentiate between the "mirror identity" you invoke and those identities written on you by external (though often subsequently - or maybe even "always-already" - internalized) forces. There are problems with Foucault, to be sure, but his analysis captures the point well in sound-bite terms: power operates only insofar as individuals are left "free."
In other words, post-Enlightenment capitalism observes an "economization of power" in which the confinement of identity and subjectivity in the interest of particular systemic ends is no longer based in direct, physical coercien, but rather the gradual inculcation of certain values (e.g. people have an obligation to "contribute" to society), truth claims (e.g. everybody is free to self-actualize however they see fit!), and practices (e.g. I excercise everyday, eat organic food, and sleep at least eight hours a night). This process is not necessarily malevolent. Docile servility of transnational capital flow, which is basically what higher education is preparing us for, certainly has its materials perks (at least for distinct segments of the global populace).
So, in a way, you're entirely correct: no one puts a gun to my head and forces me to attend class. I still submit, however, that the compulsions "keeping" me from diverging radically from the class norms that have defined my identity for going on twenty-one years are powerful and complicated, and furthermore, that simply explaining away the subjective limitations of the social field of late capitalism by constantly invoking abstract, totalizing notions of "freedom" is analytically stale. Though maybe it's as you say explicitly in your reply to es23: you're concerned with "a deeper sense of identity" than Harvey. Sigh. When are those inane social critics going to overcome their superficial notions of identity and realize what inheres beneath? Haven't they heard of the transcendental Human Spirit? Silly nihilists.
I believe Harvey's discussion of the simulacrum fits interestingly into this debate. In the postmodern world of time-space compression, humans can shop for their identities. Harvey writes in reference to postmodern fiction, "dazed and distracted characters wander through these worlds without a clear sense of location, wondering, 'which world am I in and which of my personalities do I deploy?'" Harvey poses the question of how can anyone recognize his or her identity in this fragmatic, chaotic simulacrum we call life? One relies on images. I think the only way one could honestly claim that he is not influenced by media images is if he were living on top of a secluded hill, having no contact with the outside world. I don't think Harvey is saying a person can only occupy one identity or "place." On the contrary, Harvey is interested in how the postmodern world allows for ones idendidty to constantly be influenced. Cultures have become accessible to the masses. One can be exposed to a foreign culture by watching a film or eating a food. But this of course raises the question of how real these experiences are. Because of everything is a simulacrum, how can one every recognize reality, let alone his own identity?
I'm actually inclined to read the discussions of simulacra as literally as possible - Harvey seems to be performing the very impossibility of recognition that he diagnoses at 289 ('such near perfect replication that the difference between the original and the copy becomes almost impossible to spot') in his later discussion of 'Blade Runner', where he fails to ever call into question Deckerd's status as 'human' (NB the ambiguity of replica-Deckard is a standard reading of the film), even as he describes Deckard's 'photo-history' in the same breath as the replicants' (312), and even as he, apparently unselfconsciously, refers in a single sentence to both Deckard's and the replicants' 'retirement' (310).
The 'Body Snatchers' moment in Jameson is illustrative: 'Your moment of doubt and hesitation as to the breath and warmth of these polyester figures, in other words, tends to return upon real human beings moving about you in the museum and to transform them for the briefest moment into so many dead and flesh-coloured simulacra in their own right' (34). I think Jameson is right to characterize this effect as a sort of radical exteriority, a 'loss of depth' and 'glossiness of skin,' because it speaks to the most troubling premise of what I guess I'll call the 'postmodern simulacra fear,' which isn't just that there are masks (transposable 'identitarian categories' or 'simulacra') but that there are no faces beneath the masks.
Recall that in 'Body Snatchers' (1978) the character of Elizabeth Driscoll is completely hollow (except for that post-pod cobwebby material) once Pod-Driscoll is done 'colonizing' her. It would appear that not only her exterior body but also the entirety of her interior has been reconstituted in Pod-Driscoll (who spends the remainder of the movie naked and shrieking), but recall also that one of the film's central tenets is the non-identity of the pod people and the people they've colonized ('My wife--she's not my wife!'). There are numerous scenes in which rhetor-pods try to convince recalcitrant humans that it's a complete data transfer, that the integrity of the consciousness is intact within the pod-body, but the film maintains faith in some irreplicable selfness, the absence of which leaves the pod-people 'vacant,' nonauratic sham copies. All of this is thrown into question, at least for me, by Driscoll, who certainly seems hollow and vacant in all the ways we expect pod-Driscoll to be, and who conceals no more of a 'face' beneath the mask than pod-Driscoll does. It really is as if we're talking about nothing more than a transposition of masks, or, in Jameson's terms, a radical exteriority.
(Apropos 'My wife--she's not my wife': there's an interesting bit in D. Dennett's 'Sweet Dreams' Re an actual 'Body Snatchers' pathology: 'People who suffer from Capgras delusion suddenly come to believe that a loved one - a spouse or lover or parent, in most cases - has been covertly replaced with a replica impostor!...[T]here have been cases in which the 'impostor' has been killed or seriously harmed by the deluded sufferer...In Capgras, the conscious, cortical face-recognition is spared - that's how the person recognizes the person standing in front of him as the spitting image [GH - could we call the acid-expectorating zombies of 'Slither' 'spitting images'?] of his loved one - but the unconscious, limbic system is disabled, draining the recognition of all the emotional resonance it ought to have. The absence of that subtle contribution is so upsetting ("Something's missing!") that it amounts to a pocket veto on the positive vote of the surviving system: the emergent result is the sufferer's heartfelt conviction that he or she is looking at an impostor' [p.94]. Apropos Dennett: cf. all mind-body philosophical debates about 'zombies,' hypothetical creatures who are indistinguishable, by any test, from humans, but who nevertheless lack conscious life - Dennett's ultimately going to reject the notion as philosophically inert, but that it remains a troubling and urgent prospect for so many of his contemporaries [as in, 'how can I prove that everyone else isn't a zombie?'] demonstrates the weird power that the mask-without-a-face phobia exerts.)
I don't think the worry necessarily is going to be that 'corporations' will clone replicants of people - though sufferers of Capgras do certainly concoct 'metaphysically extravagant' and 'improbable' conspiracies to account for the switch (Dennett, p. 94) - so much as that in the absence of any non-fungible selfness it's going to be difficult to maintain any kind of 'identitarian' stability (I think this is what Harvey is getting at whenever he talks about disposable histories, values, identities, etc., for instance at p.286). There is no shortage of movies dealing with 'identity theft,' and I've already touched on one of them above, but I'd like to quickly reference 'The Passenger' here, because I think it illustrates the level at which this disposability occurs: there's this unspoken sense in the movie that the gig would be up not as soon as someone recognized David Locke (who, for reference, has stolen a passport photo and appointment book off a corpse and begun to keep his appointments [mostly with arms dealers]--and who, for reference, says things like, 'I used to be someone else, but I traded him in') but rather as soon as he missed an appointment (Locke's girlfriend in particular seems to believe that as soon as Locke jumps the rails of this borrowed identity he's going to have nothing to do or be).
If the self can be reduced either to images (understood in Bumpkins' socio-ethnical or es23's brand-identity terms, or [and Harvey would love this] literally as a passport photo) or to subject positions (the role you claim to play, 3NT, when reporting to class, or the Althusserian ideologies or Lyotardian narratives that we occupy, or the 'itinerary' that David Locke slips into, for a time, seamlessly), then it doesn't seem that outlandish that someone as 'American, Italian, Croatian, Yankee fan, Pomona student, music fan, and entrepeneury' as our beloved Bumpkins could replace him (Re 'beloved': do, in fact, replicant or simulacra identities hold between lovers outside 'Vertigo'?), but then the real worry seems to be that there was nothing beneath the Bumpkin-mask (or our own, for that matter) to replace in the first place.
--Guattari Hero
Even though the above post is already an overlong, embarrassingly superficial synthesis of disparate texts ('Body Snatchers, Dennett, AND Antonioni? GO with it!'), it seems negligent to discuss postmodern identity complexes w/o at least mentioning 'City of Glass.' If anyone else wants to bear that torch for me, please, feel free.
--Guattari Hero