I’m a big fan of Sci-Fi TV. One of my current favourites is the canceled-but-still-bleeding series Dollhouse. In one of the recent episodes (2×05), there was a good segment that reveals a lot about identity construction (OK, so I think the whole series has been playing with that). So, I posted that clip to YouTube for your viewing pleasure. Before getting to the video, I want to frame the scene (which will contain spoilers).
Tag Archive for 'identity'
I was involved in an ESF-sponsored workshop on technology and religion this past week. While the discussion focused on communicative technologies and media, we did drift at times beyond that. Here are some scribbles and notes of mine from the various sessions.
Mediation
Our first session started with Birgit Meyer and Bengt Kristensson Uggla. Conceiving of media as something external to religion makes questions regarding the intersection of the two unanswerable. However, if media is seen as being embedded within religion, these issues are transformed into understandable practices. Media, then, is able to mediate religious thoughts and beliefs. In this way, media become sacralised so that mediation is made immanent and the gap between and believer and the transcendent is significantly reduced. This immediacy, mitigated through semiotic ideology, denies media as media and leads to its being externalised. It may be a good idea to think of theology as a theory of mediation. Lastly, technology makes globalisation immediately local (again, mediation).
Identity
The second session was led by Siegfried Zielinski and Jan-Olav Henriksen (sorry, this one is in Norwegian). One important thing to keep in mind is that media as a generalised concept did not arise until the mid-20th century (i.e. the last 50-60 years). Communicative technologies existed prior to that (obviously), but these were particulars. Today’s globalisation is seeing the harmonisation and unification of media so that the different technologies appear seamless. Electricity has become the ’soul’ of ‘new media’, animating it as a machine. Machines always reduce complexity and mediate between two objects. It used to be that we humans had to believe in machines in order for them to work (i.e. by turning a switch, etc); but now machines have returned the favour by believing in us to animate them (e.g. interactive games, television, etc). On the other hand, religion provides a chain of memory–however fragmented and disjointed it may be. This is mediated by technology. However, technology can create a sensory excess that creates a feeling of divine presence without that chain of memory. In other words, technology has made it possible for one to participate in a religious community without ‘really’ participating in that community (e.g. Yoga videos in YouTube that provide simple instruction without the ‘full Yoga experience’). As Zielinski noted, one is ‘always the same, never myself’ (his own reversal of the Calvin Klein tag line ‘Always myself, never the same’).
Secularisation
The third session was presented by Ola Sigurdson, Jayne Svenungsson, and Lieven Boeve. It is quite clear that religion isn’t ‘returning’ because it never left in the first place. The ‘privatisation’ of religion has led to a loss of body and particularity as religion loses its institutional form (c.f. Olivier Roy’s Globalised Islam). This ‘private religion’ turns religion into a fetish. In fact, this new ‘personalised’ religion has transformed religious pilgrimages such that the relics now go to the people instead of the people going to the relics. Technology isn’t showing us a ‘post-secular’ world (as in a ‘return of religion’) but rather a transformation of religion in the public space, particularly in the cases of extremist religious groups which have found new solidarity and strength in the techno-globalised world.
Revolutions
The fourth session was led by Caroline Vander Stichele, Ward Blanton, and Edmund Arens. Echoing the sentiment of the first session of technology being closely tied to religion, this session dealt with looking at religious revolutions based on technological revolutions. One example is that of Yoga in the West as a practice originally separated from its Hindu roots. However, it has become its own consumer-driven religion in which one can get meditative tranquility instantly. Another example, is Augustine’s discussion of the divine postal network (e.g. messenger angels, etc) in relation to his understanding of the Roman Empire’s postal network. Religion needs to be addressed as a communicative practice of memory and narrative. The danger of a consumer-driven religion is, as I mentioned above, the kind of (private) participation without (public) participation. Religion must occur in both the public and the private sphere.
Subjectivity
The final session was led by Arne Grøn and Anne Kull. Subjectivity is the key notion to formulate the problems above (between religion and society) as it gets directly at the concept of identity construction both in relation to the world and the self. In expressing oneself, one exteriorises oneself and bridges the divide between the public and private spheres. Public life is only possibile if it acknowledges a private life as well. Religion, as a public activity, is a meta-sphere of visibility of publicised figures (i.e. private individuals). However, one should be wary to use the term ‘virtual’ in describing religion in the new media (e.g. online churches) because in one very real sense, all churches are ‘virtual’ as they represent the ‘real’ church in a locality. There must be a hermeneutics of subjectivity as it is implied by a phenomenological ontology (a la Heidegger).
Deleuze immediately makes clear the infinite regress of sense. Carroll’s work is insightful because it makes us confront “a synthesis of the heterogeneous; the serial form is necessarily realized in the simultaneity of at least two series” (36). the infinite regress of sense is itself a series, a series of multiple series that each inhere on each other–a synthesis of series. The two series operate different: one as signifier and the other as signified. The direct result of these two inhering on each other is a disequilibrium created by the excess of one in the other. The signifier series manifests as an occupant without a place, a supernumerary object in the signified series. This signified creates an empty place within the signifier. The excess of each series manifests as both esoteric and exoteric words in paradoxical forms in which each exists “only through the relations they maintain with one another” (50).
These relations, then, create singularities–that is, points of turning, inflections, tears, fusion, etc. Each of these “correspond to each one of the series of a structure” and is “the source of a series extending in a determined direction right up to the vicinity of another singularity” (52-3). Visually, these singularities create sets of divergent and convergent lines like that of a magnet. Singularities form ideal events. With regards to time, events in their purest forms are never actualities. They are only tales and stories, events which are about to happen and those which have just happened. They are never in the present, never happening.
The disequilibrium of sense, which Deleuze points to through the various dualities (e.g. empty square and supernumerary object), is always in relation to itself as the paradox of nonsense (66). Nonsense, however, is not the lack of sense. The relation between sense and nonsense is not simply a copy of that between true and false. Instead, there is an original relation between the two. Sense is always produced, an effect of the relation between the signifier and signified. The paradox of sense is that nonsense is also present within sense and within the event of signification. Nonsense must be understood as being opposed to the abscense of sense because it produces sense in excess.
Sense should not be confused with “good sense.” “Good sense” always come second to sense as it presupposes a distrubution of sense. It, like the arrow of time, determines the direction which sense runs. The paradox of sense, though, is that it goes both directions simultaneously. Common sense identifies the objects within a language. Yet in Alice, identity is completely lost. The paradox is this reversal of both good sense and common sense. Alice discovers through the looking glass that common sense has long disappeared. Yet, at this very point where language itself seems impossible, “having no subject which expresses or manifests itself in it, no object to denote, no classes and no properties to signify according to a fixed order,” that the gift of meaning occurs before all good and common sense (79). With the passion of this paradox, language reaches the height of its power. The two directions of sense, of becoming-mad, are represented in by Carroll’s doubles. The pair of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare each live in one direction, the two inseparable from one another. Each direction segments itself to “the point that both are found in either” (79). The Hatter and Hare killed the present which survives only in the Dormouse. The present subsists only as the abstract moment, infinitely subdivisible into past and future. The maifestation of sense is always a fragile one within and without the abstract moment of the present.
Recently, there was a debate regarding religious pluralism at my university. One of the panelists provided some useful definitions, which I will use here for simplicity. First, we begin with atheism as the belief that all religions are wrong. The logical opposite would be that at least 1 religion is correct. This leads to another disjunction: only one religion is correct (and thus we have exclusivism) or more than one religion is correct. Under this level, there is another disjunction: either one religion is “more correct” or more than one are equally correct. The former here gives us inclusivism, the latter pluralism. Note that none of these require that all religions are equally correct, which I supposed could be classified as relativism.
One of the other panelists is a Catholic theologian who began with exclusivism. However, as his argument proceeded with references to many 2nd-Vatican and post-2nd-Vatican texts (e.g. Lumen Gentium), he began to approach inclusivism as he suggested that even though the universal Church is the primary medium through which salvation occurs, it does not exclude others. A corollary to this was that there is some truth in other religions. The first panelist, a pluralist, saw this flaw and was one of the stronger arguments against this sort of exclusivism because it was inclusivism in disuguise.
The pluralist’s argument was that one should develop true respect and appreciation for other religions because at least some of them lead to the same ending (whether that be the classic ideas of heaven or moksa). However, the fatal flaw in this argument is that religious difference is subsumed to religious identity, which leads to an “appreciation” of religions based on an assumed identity. In other words, this really is inclusivism in sheep’s clothing. If the pluralist wishes to respect other religions, it cannot be through the subsumption of difference to identity. It would be a stronger argument if it realizes that difference over and above identity as the excess of religion itself.
Baudrillard has become somewhat famous in popular culture through the play on his ideas in the movie The Matrix where an astute viewer can see the image of his face appear as a ghostly haunting throughout the film (he also helped in the writing and production of the film). However, he has been “famous” for some time in contemporary philosophy as one of the pioneers in theorizing about the body and the images. In his book, Impossible Exchange, he proposes a progression of simulation which can be seen in two examples: capital and identity.
The first progression is that from the object to signs. In other words, an object begins with some kind of arbitrary value which is the basis for exchange. Money and capital as we know it did not exist at this level. We can see this in action with historical transactions between two entities: I exchange ten pounds of fertilizer and receive 25 gallons of milk. However, the progression to signs involves a kind of “standardization” in which each objects value is given a relatively static exchange ratio: a gallon of milk will be 4 units of this new sign–be it a dollar or whatever. At this point, the object becomes a commodity that is freely exchangeable in the market; it has become a simulation of the object.
This ability to be exchanged brings about the second progression: fetishism. A fetish is a perversion of the object that further removes it from the “real” object. It becomes a “pure, unrepresentable, unexchangeable object–yet a nondescript one” (Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, 129). Here, the object is taken to the point of being a desire for the sake of desire. Zizek sees this best in the example of Caffeine free Diet Coke: it lacks everything that makes “Coke” “Coke” but it is the pure semblance of Coke, “an artificial promise of a substance which never [materializes]” (Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 22). The fetish is not just a simulation of a simulation (what Baudrillard calls a simulacra) but it is also devoid of the “original” object: it is the nothingness itself.
Here we can see the final progression: the spectre (or phantasm). The object now becomes an unrepresented non-being which haunts the “real.” Not only does the object become a simulation, but even its component parts become simulated: Toyota cars are manufactured 60% in the USA. Perhaps the best example of this progression is in the phenomena called “reality TV.” These shows are no more real than “normal TV”: absurd scenarios with unreal events, simulated events, false personas, etc. Here, the actors are not given a particular role but rather play their own made-up role, an idealized, distorted self-image.
A direct corollary can be seen in that of The Matrix where those in the “real world” are projected back into the “virtual” world of the Matrix as imagined bodies. One’s identity in the “real world” is fragmented and distorted as the Matrix is treated as being more real than real, a hyperreality. As the end of The Matrix trilogy shows: there is no real distinction between the “real” world and that of the Matrix because one’s identity is a composite of fragments from many different “worlds” which reach across all the boundaries.
Where does all of this leave identity? A poster put up in Berlin in 1994 poked fun at loyalties to identities: “Your Chris is a Jew. Your car is Japanese. Your pizza is Italian. Your democracy–Greek. Your coffee–Brazilian. Your holiday–Turkish. Your numbers–Arabic. Your letters–Latin. Only your neighbour is a foreigner” (quoted from Zygmunt Bauman, Identity, 27). As the above progression of simulation is explored, it will become more obvious that “‘belonging’ and ‘identity’ are not cut in rock, that they are not secured by a lifelong guarantee, that they are eminently negotiable and revocable; and that one’s own decisions, the steps one takes, the way one act–and the determination to stick by all that–are crucial factors of both” (Bauman, 11).
