Identity
The relation things bears only to itself
1. The Fiction of the Self and the Self of Fiction
( compare writers and readers to artists and viewers)
Sense of personal identity
Oneself as impermeably distinct from all others, enclosed within one's own ongoing version of the world, which is semi-opaque (or semi-transparent — an analogue to the half-empty/half-full-glass dichotomy).
Fictive Enchantment
Tampers with one's sense of metaphysical fundamentals, facts that hold down our sense of reality, fundamentals which are only systematically questioned in philosophy.
To enter into fictive enchantment is to feel the walls of the self becoming so porous that the sense of other lives intermingles with one's own.
The illusion of inhabiting lives other than one's own, of experiencing, at its most intense, what can feel almost like a discontinuity in personal identity, is delivered to us nowhere else but in storytelling
Fiction
has the power to tamper with our normally tamper-proof senses of personal identity and sequential time that widens the scope of personal experience for those who are fictionally engaged and puts them in the way of assaults by truth.
The vivification that occurs when we are fictively engaged lends the fictions of literature just enough reality to make us inhabit them almost as if we truly believed in them: enchantment.
Personal experience can get enlarged into something beyond itself.
In creating character and context, some aspects of the writer’s self, emotion, desire, attitude, fleeting thought or substantive experience or a more complicated psychological state compounded of some set of emotion, desire, attitude, etc. gets broken off by virtue of one's attending to it, isolated and objectified in contemplation of its nature, genesis, implications or just plain oddness.
Psycheme ⬆
can become the germ of a character or of a theme or mood or tone, from which all else eventually follows: an entire world wrought.
Truism - all fiction is autobiographical
personal enough to make all that derives from it shot through with a liveliness approaching personal experience, which makes for the all-important aesthetic quality of believable
Goldstein, R. (2006). ‘The Fiction of the Self and the Self of Fiction’, The Massachusetts Review, 47(2), 293-309. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25091087.pdf?refreqid=
2. Performing your fictional identity: The true imaginary
The rejection of fiction is a popular trope in present day mass culture, and is also reflected in aesthetic theories deemed radical or experimental. Reality TV shows is one of the fastest growing genres especially with social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram, although most seem to be staged or scripted to a point. Gilbert was interested with our cultural obsession with reality show, the notion that our entertainment ( and art ) must become more “real”.
Dramatic art has shifted closer to reality and further from fiction, each theatrical era claiming the most recent creations are closer to “reality”. Actors are often judged based on the realism of their performances, characterizations with natural gestures and expressions. American playwright, David Mamet took theatrical realism a step further, stating that it is not “real” enough just to portray characters in exhaustive detail, all actors should do is “be themselves”. “The actor does not need to‘ become’ the character. . . . There is no character . . . the audience sees an illusion of a character upon the stage . . . the actor has to undergo nothing whatsoever”. Then comes the question if the actors meant what they say or do or simply taking up a stance? The inclination for realism over fiction invalidate narrative at times, while personal narrations are valued over fictional stories as they are deemed more “real”.
David Hawkes: “There is no doubt that, in the twenty-first century, images really do determine reality, the human subject really is objectified, and the global market really is likely to remain the only significant world power for the foreseeable future.”
Michael Foucault’s philosophy
Fiction might be truth
Alexander Nehamas notes in The Art of Living, Foucault “believed that the care of the self was not a process of discovering who one truly is but of invention and improvising who one can be. Foucault’s model for the care of the self was the creation of art”
Fiction: possibility for limitless self-creation
Oscar Wilde - “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891)
a utopia in which all our physical needs are taken care of, which allows each person to become an artist through development of their own “personality”
Sky Gilbert ( author of this paper)
All identities are fictional - view the concept of playful fiction that constantly intersect with the truth as the future of identity politics
People can identify as anything as there is no absolute truth in a world of concepts other than fictions that we eternally concocted about ourselves.
Danger does not come from believing lies / fiction but believing our own personal lies to be universally true.
Everyone’s duty to create an identity as care for self ( we are creatures of fiction / art )
Imaginings become true if we believe and act in a world as if they are true
Gilbert, S. ‘Performing your fictional identity: The true imaginary’, Academia, Available at:
3. Double Trouble: Parafictional Personas and Contemporary Art
The (Seductively) Unreliable Persona
Contemporary presentational media are grounded in the performance and presentation of the individual, as people (or indeed companies or organisations) present versions of themselves that they desire to be appreciated by others as true or authentic.
Persona = an everyday performance, where the purpose of the presentation of self is to convince the audience that the performance is genuine and authentic
Authenticity ≠ Truth
Online Identities
➜ Selective & idealized ( Ruth E. Page )
➜ Social expectations that online identities are authentic representations of an offline self (Marshall and Barbour)
➜ Richard Prince, Natalie Bookchin, Penelope Umbrico
⬥ appropriating and exploiting presentational media in ways that destabilise the prioritisation of the individual and the subjective
“Authentic” Self
➜ Artists/ Performers - constructing ambiguous and fictionalized versions of selves
personas, pseudonyms and pen names - artistic, literary and cinematic media
➜
Melanie Piper: Identifies complex relationship between “acting as” and “being” oneself, arguing that comedians like Louis C.K. exist in a “perpetual state of what could be authentic self-performance or a performance of the authentic”
The fictional additions that construct these unreliable personas are an excess or “surplus” to their “original” referents
unreliable personas do not simply expose or critique the limits to authentic self-presentation — they often actively resist and flout cultural expectations around “truthful” (re)presentation more broadly.
complicate the interminably complex relationships between documentary, history and fiction at play across our cultural landscape
Historiographic Turn to Parafictional
Obsession with archiving the past
Lambert-Beatty - key to parafictionality is not whether a fictive construct is strictly possible but whether it is plausible
Plausibility and believability are defining factors for parafictions because they bind the fictive elements of the project to pre-existing understandings of reality.
“Truthiness” — Stephen Colbert
what you want the facts to be as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support
sense of the inherent fictionality of our contemporary culture
Parafictional Personas and Contemporary Art
A fictionalized presentation of a real person that keeps “one foot in the field of the real”
characterized by their conscious fictionalizations and unreliability
constructing a fictionalized version of oneself allows for multiple levels of fiction and reality to co-exist, maintaining a sense of open-endedness and irresolvability
Fictive Personas - most successful when grounded in reality
Lambert-Beatty
Moment of reveal is crucial - trigger audience to return to fictive construct, re-appreciate it with the knowledge of deception
Complex and ethically problematic effects of viewers - humiliating, changes them
Parafictional Personas
Challenge the status and assumed primacy of proper names as marker of individuality
⬇⬇
always in relation to common and multiple signifiers
paradox: rather than referring to a singular thing, it always refers to systems of multiplicity
Foregrounding and appropriating the relationship between individual subjects and the signs that denote its individuality
Omer Fast
➜ Film and video installations
➜ creates his fictionalised personas by writing himself into his videos, typically using actors to portray an “Omer Fast” or a “director” character
⬥ Based on interviews and individuals stories of real-life experiences
⬥ Discussed in context of “documentary” ⤵
Entangled with fictionalisation, performances and role playing
⬥ fact ↔ fiction / documentary ↔ fiction
⬥ Resist the notion of unique, authentic self
⬥ A sense of uncertainty while representing real life
★ “Mistaken identity”
★ Performative role-playing
★ highlights the shifting roles and subject positions internal to the original event itself
“re-enactment of the imaginary filming of an impossible real event” — Maria Muhle
Parafictional personas
embed fictional constructs within reality, particularly due to the difficulties in separating elements represented by the same proper name.
allow for multiple levels of fictionality and reality to co-exist
generate a sense of open-endedness and irresolvability, continually forcing the question within the viewer of what “version” of the person is speaking.
Uncertainty for viewers - open up for criticality and investigation
Expose how much viewers (and societies) search for ideas of truth and resolution, even when they are explicitly presented or revealed to us as incomplete or questionable
“it is a fabrication comprised from an interpretation of one’s identity and how that identity is made into a public entity”
Deploying fiction or parafiction may risk overtaking real subject matters.
Yet, these strategies can do justice to their subjects not by attempting the impossible task of faithful representation, but by integrating them into new logics of re-presentation.
Warren, K. (2016) ‘Double Trouble: Parafictional Personas and Contemporary Art’, May. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/36345207/Double_Trouble_Parafictional_Personas_
4. The Relationship between Fiction and Autobiography
➢ Should autobiography be regarded as fiction or nonfiction?
➢ Is it useful to make a distinction between autobiography and fiction and on what grounds
such a distinction can be made?
Autobiography
Autobiography is not an invention of author but a documentary report of his life
“Possess a truth value”
Relate to reality outside text that can be verified or falsified
Scholars realize autobiography is not nonfiction
Hemingway, E.
AMF written similarly to TSAR (tone, subject, dialogue)
Hemingway infuses nonfiction with fiction he infuses fiction with elements of factual narration
Hemingway’s prose is famous not for being realistic but for making things real
Alfred Kazin
By using the narrative style of fiction the autobiographical text ceases to be nonfiction
“Assume the mask of sincerity and only pretends to tell the absolute truth; just another way of telling a story… and it uses facts as a strategy”
Genieve Lyold
“Truth Value” - falsification and verification based on objective knowledge
Object ➜ Objective Knowledge ➜ Standard Truth
The Self = Subject ➜ Subjective ( contradict objectivity, thereby reality )
“to qualify as real, things must be there independently of particular points of view”
H. Potter Abbott
One of the fictions that form the self’s idea of life and consequently autobiographic writing is the notion of life as a “voyage of self-discovery”
Autobiography should be seen as an act which does not occur in a moment that is separated from life but is, in fact, the expression of this life at a certain point in time
Avoid reading the autobiographical text as factual not to cut this text off from a reality outside of itself, it only means to see this reality in a different aspect of the text.
Autobiography or Fiction
➜ Autobiographical text in spite of and even by creating fiction presents truth, the truth of the
self that reveals itself in the presentation of the fiction of his or her life.
➜ The possibility that memories are not fact but fiction
➜ Truth does not so much depend on objectivity as on an ability to touch and create a lasting impression
Flohr, B. (2012) ‘The Relationship between Fiction and Autobiography’, Researchgate, April. Available at: https://www.itp.uni-hannover.de/fileadmin/arbeitsgruppen/ag_flohr/papers/m-
8. How Artists Explore Identity
Phrenology
pseudoscience by a German physician named Franz Joseph Gall in 1796.
Found what parts of the human brain corresponded with certain skillsets and personality traits, and that these traits could be determined by the shape of ones cranium, which corresponded with the shape of the brain.
The traits in question were quite specific and defined in a way that was aimed at figuring out every possible combination of actions that a human could take.
Physiognomy
The art of judging human character based on facial features
16th-century Europe, as physicians, philosophers, and scientists searched for tangible, external clues to internal temperaments.
Physiognomy—from the ancient Greek, gnomos (character) and physis (nature), hence “the character of one’s nature”
Artist - Personal & Social identity
Stereotypically : Gender, sexuality, race, nationality and heritage
Photography
Sought to uncover, capture something of the real unguarded person behind their public image
Descriptions of a Person
Ligon asked friends to write descriptions of him as if they were reporting a missing person to the police.
He then rendered the text in typography that mimicked the original ads and paired them with drawings from newspapers and anti-slavery pamphlets of the time.
Ligon explained, “‘Runaways is broadly about how an individual’s identity is inextricable from the way one is positioned in the culture, from the ways people see you, from historical and political contexts.
Gutiérrez, D. (2017) ‘How artists explore identity- Art 110’, Rio Hondo College, March 8. Available at: https://www.slideshare.net/danielasgtrz/how-artists-explore-identity-art-110
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