1. Cultural identities
the postmodern self: stuart hall

2. The enlightenment subject
• Hall charts the progress of three epochal
subjects:
– The enlightenment subject is endowed with the
capacities of reason, consciousness, and action,
whose ‘centre’ consists of an inner core which first
emerged when the subject was born, and
unfolded with it while remaining essentially the
same throughout the individual existence.
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3. The sociological subject
– The sociological subject was formed in relation to
‘significant others’. Identity, in this conception,
bridges the gap between the ‘inside’ and the
‘outside’ – between the personal and the public
worlds.
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4. The sociological subject: Giddens
• Giddens: self- and social identity
• Self-identity is not a distinctive trait, or even a collection of
traits, possessed by the individual. It is the self as reflexively
understood by the person in terms of her or his biography.
(1991:53)
• Social identities … are associated with normative rights,
obligations and sanctions which, within special collectivities,
form roles. The use of standardised markers, especially to do
with the bodily attributes of age and gender, is fundamental
to all societies, notwithstanding large cross-cultural variation
which can be noted. (1984: 282-30)
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5. The postmodern subject
– The post-modern subject is historical not
biologically defined. The subject assumes different
identities at different times, identities which are
not unified around a coherent ‘self’.
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6. ‘ruptures’: marxism
Five ‘Ruptures in the discourses of modern
knowledge’ (Hall, 1990: 285) have contributed to this
de-centred subject:
• Marxism
• In Louis Althusser´s interpretation of Marx´s writings
he negates individuals as the ‘authors’ or agents of
history, since they could only act on the basis of
historical conditions made by others into which they
were born, and using the resources provided to them
from previous generations.
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7. ‘ruptures’: psychoanalysis
– Psychoanalysis
– In Jacques Lacan´s reading of Freud identity is
something formed through unconscious processes
over time, rather than being innate in
consciousness at birth.
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8. ‘ruptures’: feminism
– The impact of feminism questioned the
classic distinction between ‘inside’ and
‘outside’, ‘private’ and ‘public’, and replaced
the idea of a coherent subject by
introducing the notion of sexual difference.
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9. ‘ruptures’: language and discourse
– Language and discourse
– The structural linguist de Saussure reasons that
the subject is not in any absolute sense the
‘author’ of statements we express in language,
since language is a social, not an individual
system.
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10. ‘ruptures’: Foucault (1)
– Foucault
– In Foucault's writings the all-encompassing
character of the administrative ‘disciplinary
power’ illustrated the paradox that the more
collective and organized the nature of the
institutions of late-modernity is, the greater the
isolation, surveillance, and individuation of the
individual subject.
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11. ‘ruptures’: Foucault (2)
– Foucault
• Discourse
• Power
• History
• Subjects
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12. ‘ruptures’: Foucault (3)
– Statements about madness which give us knowledge about madness;
– The rules which prescribe what is ‘sayable’ or ‘thinkable’ about
madness;
– Subjects who personify the discourses of madness, i.e. the ‘madman’;
– The processes by which discourses of madness acquire authority and
truth at a given historical moment;
– The practices within institutions which deal with madness;
– The idea that different discourses about madness will appear at late
historical moments, producing new knowledge and a new discursive
formation.
– Barker, C. (2000) Cultural Studies. London Sage: 78-79
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13. ‘ruptures’: Foucault (4)
• Bodies are subject to the regulatory power of
discourse
• Through discourse bodies become subjects for
themselves and for others
• Hence Foucault can talk of subjectivity as
formed within the subject positions of
discourse.
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14. ‘ruptures’: Foucault (5)
• ‘*Foucault’s approach+ suggests that discourses
themselves construct the subject-positions from
which they become meaningful and have effects.
Individuals may differ … but they will not be able to
take meaning until they have been able to identify
with those positions which the discourse constructs,
subjected themselves to its rules, and hence become
the subjects of its power/knowledge.
Hall (1997): 56
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15. Essentialism and anti-essentialism
– Essentialism: Identity is the name for a collective
‘one true self’, formed from a common ancestry,
history and symbolic resources. Example:
‘American identity’.
– Black American … Black African … Black …?
– The ‘articulation’ of situated identities
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