Examination: A Survey of Self and Identity

• In Event: (Im)Possibilities of Alternative Representation of Reality, Memory, and Research in the Crisis of Representation

Abstract

Purpose
Currently, I am interested in studying identity and knowledge. Questions that arise from that interest include queries about the origins and formation of both identity and knowledge, where identity and knowledge might intersect and where they might diverge, and whether identity and knowledge are mutually exclusive, mutually inclusive, or a combination thereof. This presentation will attempt to provide more clarification with regards to these questions.

Theoretical Framework and Mode of Inquiry
The methods employed during the course of this study facilitated an emergence of knowledge and experience but not necessarily a definition of them. “We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the ‘evidence.’" (Laing, 1967). In a postmodern emergent methodology the focus is on creation from working the space in between. It is not about producing a more authentic version of reality (Somerville, 2007).

Data Sources
The provision of an epistemological dissection of self through an ontological excavation of identity is shaped, in large part, by a postmodern frame. This settling, this compromise away from the dominant episteme, but still expressed somewhat by a similar dialect, is professed because it emerges as an alternative to the attempt that forces postmodern, fragmented, multi-subjective data into a modernist framework (Davison, 2006).

Point of View
“The impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.” (Baudrillard, 1994, p 19). This research seeks to provide an epistemological dissection of self through an ontological excavation of identity and acknowledges the hardship encountered by an accurate representation of such data.

Scholarly Significance
We are shaped by past events and ideas, even in the midst of a process where we seek to criticize and repudiate those events and ideas. “In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin.” (Derrida, 1997, p 36). The insistence to replicate discourse promotes simulation in a way that is not intended.
This aggressive selecting of one form over another, of one content over another, is ready for the suggestion of an alternative (Reader, 2008). These alternatives must emerge from outside existing frameworks sanctioned by the dominant episteme.

Author

• Christopher Strople, Chapman University