Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

How modern technology shape-shifts our identity
The Unnamable, “the role of objects is to restore silence” (Deirdre, 1978: 45). The role of
technology has become one of abolishing silence as the belief in the reality of the object
has been eroded. Yet, again, the object is no more an object of belief than belief itself is
an object of thought: they are complex events seized in the spatialized time of meaning,
the putative unity of finite experience. Both cultural and technical objects, whether
element, individual or ensemble, are events like entering a skyscraper, reading a poem,
overcoming the fear of flying, learning how to use a computer or mourning the death
of a parent. All these situations can comprise elements of melancholy, anxiety or the
absurd inscribed within their temporal occurrence. Creativity is multidirectional: Janus
has many faces (not only two), some of which are hidden from knowledge. Meaning
occurs at the interface of what exists and what does not yet exist, the one infinitely
regressive, the other infinitely progressive; hence, for example, the ambivalence of art in
relation to the past, and the determining function of memory in thought. Technology is
what inscribes the subject in the world where absurdity and creativity are the reciprocal
conditions of the event itself, rather than of the subject. Technology is the sanction of
the finite subject, because it brings to bear a multiplicity of constitutive energies upon
a circumscribed occasion of meaning. This is the creative, non-transcendent obverse of
Husserl’s re-activation of the past: what is more urgent is to find the value of the activation
of the present, its precariously creative plenitude and catastrophic self-evacuation, its
paradoxical status as both temporal process and a temporal form, its inability to be
either identical to itself or different from itself. The irony is that such value can only ever
be performed, not thought; and this is precisely the motive of technology.
In contemporary society, for many people social life and society have an impersonal
character. They feel that they do not have control of their lives and of decisions that
affect them. Globalization, comodification and bureaucratization can result in feelings of
alienation. In a global world, in which lifestyles and values are differentiating, intimacy
is increasingly not found locally but with people who are spatially distanced and reached
by means of communication technologies. There is a globalization of intimacy, the need
to organize personal relationships over spatial and temporal distances. That range derives
from the nature of identity, particularly the nature of identity in urban environments within
advanced economies. Many people conceptualize identity as static and readily discernable,
implicit in notions that “I am who I am ... and everyone can see that without much difficulty”.
In reality identity is far more mutable. In most circumstances it is a manifestation of social
relationships, not of innate characteristics. Those relationships may be as fundamental (and
thus invisible) as gender or age, although even those attributes may be “negotiated” through
mechanisms such as clothing, a haircut or ID card. They may instead be as malleable as
possession of a key or clipboard, with a long history of incidents in which scammers were
provided with access to a restricted facility or removed assets merely because they wore the
right uniform and looked authoritative. If your identity is your credit card you may face
difficulty in environments where a transaction does not necessitate directly sighting the
plastic. Identity is performed. As a result it can be subverted.
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