“If ‘cyberspace’ once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social media has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a theatre where these prostrations to identity are performed.”
— Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (via frenchrollo)
Tag: identity
“I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself–as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll ever come to defining myself.”
— Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
(via dieworten)
“I had to go through a time of isolation in order to come to terms with who and what I was, as distinguished from all the things I’d been told I was. […] I remember feeling that I’d come through something, shed a dying skin and was naked again. I wasn’t, perhaps, but I certainly felt more at ease with myself. And then I was able to write.”
— James Baldwin, in a 1984 Paris Review interview
“So how do we disappear today? We need to disable multiple online accounts to lose ourselves, and others. We leave behind algorithmic traces we can’t even see, accumulating rather than erasing data and ties. Apps tell people where we are and social media keeps constant track of us like news ticker. In twenty-first century life, driving or walking away (‘dropping out’) would merely be symbolic. All disappearance acts are announced online, and are more often than not, just empty threats. Retreats are narrated as they happen. Everyone expects us back soon. We call our own bluff. We cry wolf. Ironically, when we are everywhere all the time, we are nowhere to be found. I like the 90s because it shows us exactly when we stopped being someone and somewhere. It’s maybe also the last time we honestly cared about being lost and found.”
– Masha Tupitsyn, from “When We Were Here: The 1990s in Film”, The White Review, December 2013.
“Identity is a dream that is pathetically absurd. You dream of being yourself when you have nothing better to do. You dream of yourself and gaining recognition when you have lost all singularity. Today we no longer fight for sovereignty or for glory, but for identity. Sovereignty was a mastery; identity is merely a reference. Sovereignty was adventurous; identity is linked to security (and also to the systems of verification which identify you). Identity is this obsession with appropriation of the liberated being, but a being liberated in sterile conditions, no longer knowing what he is. It is a label of existence without qualities. Now, all energies – the energies of minorities and entire peoples, the energies of individuals – are concentrated today on that derisory affirmation, that prideless assertion: I am! I exist! I’m alive, I’m called so-and-so, I’m European! A hopeless affirmation, in fact, since when you need to prove the obvious, it is by no means obvious.”
— Jean Baudrillard – Impossible Exchange (via hisdudenessposts)
The self in high modernity is not a minimal self, but the experience of large arenas of security intersects, sometimes in subtle, sometimes in nakedly disturbing, ways with generalised sources of unease. Feelings of restlessness, foreboding and desperation may mingle in individual experience with faith in the reliability of certain forms of social and technical framework.
Anthony Giddens, “Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age” (via sotsioloogiablogi)
lazz:
Fred Moten: As a noun “gender” just becomes something to critique. I can see using “ungendering.” I can also see gender as a set of verbs, like “engendering”–because, OK, the thing about blurring is it’s so bound up with generativity. Part of what’s a stake is the old notion of gender and identity, and the absolute assumption of legitimacy of individuation. What’s really interesting about the insugency of the pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” is that they resist that individuation. That seems to me to have as much of an impact and as much importance with regard to questions about blackness as it would about transness or queerness, whereas identity and politics is all about individuation.
-Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon exhibition catalogue
“The restrictions of identity are neither about race nor gender nor even sexuality, but the narrowness of experience. If I had to rely on my experience, as it is at the moment […] —if I had to believe that this was the only scope of my existence, the only thing available to me as subject or as idea, I think I would go mad.”
— Édouard Louis and Zadie Smith on writing in a distracting political present
“Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of our ‘self’ only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says ‘me’.”
— Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition (75)
countervisuality 