Human Identity and Their Sims

Cissy Tri Aninditha

180410110045

Response 1 (Draft 4)

On the discussion about "Structure" I'm still a bit confused with the essence of ideology if at the end, each ideology that was built by a person, will also be demolished or deconstructed by the same person and it will continue to be repeated as the phase of life lived by the subject / individual. Then why subject painstakingly shaping their ideology and identity of each?

That question seems to be answered through group discussion last week about the “Desire and Self”. The identity of a subject consciously and unconsciously done through the processes of mimicking / imitating / mimetic / mimic / mockery that explained by a quote from Samuel Weber's formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration in Bhabha’s “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”

“Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that Is almost the same but not quite.” (p. 126)

Regarding the issue of “the same but not quite” discussed in Bhabha's essay by describing people of India who tried to fit in with the surrounding environment so that they can be recognized as a European / English people. The same is clearly illustrated in the novel “A Backward Place” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala where some characters which obviously Indians are trying hard to adjust themselves to the lifestyle and culture of Americans even though in the end they still are Indians.

Examples of other cases regarding the mimetic discussed in our group is the game titled "The Sims" which is a simulation of human social life. In the game, each player is free to give a name to their virtual characters, build their character’s home, set the number of its family members, physical appearance, sex selection, emotions, skills, weaknesses, nature, emotions, things like, etc. so that virtual characters played really resemble real humans. Interestingly, almost everyone I know who play this game creates a virtual character with physical appearance similar to their appearance in the real world, while there also people who create their virtual characters on the Sims by adding the properties that purposes is to tend to be ideal and different from their (the Sims players’) natural character in the real world .

I see this is quite interesting because through the actual process of mimicry, subjects who did that looks like as if they having a half identity as the A (original Identity) and a half identity as the B (Identity of which they tried to imitate) in one physical body. After all, if such thing happens then the subject don't have an identity? Because even though there are two kinds of different identities, but each only a part of it; instead it just like throwing his own identity? So what they want from the mimetic process? Referring to Lacan in “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” mimetic processes that exist in the two cases above are part of the “Mirror Stage” "to form the "Self" by imagining the figure of the "Ideal-I" to be imitated.

Regarding the figure of the "Ideal-I" which was used as a target or object mimicry/mimetic, Lacan in "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud" said that

“The desired object is a substitute for the real unattainable object (the mother’s body; the original lost unity) whose residue in the unconscious provokes desire. Such desire can only move from one desired object to another; it never attain its goal of restoring that lost unity of the self.” (p. 447)

Furthermore, Lacan also mentioned that

 “What the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language.” (p. 447)

 This is because the signs are emerging from Self's unconscious can also be regarded as a language, though not written, nor in oral form. The entanglement between the “Self” which is formed by the desire of the subject's unconscious is also reaffirmed by Lacan that

“The elementary structures of culture reveals an ordering of possible exchanges which, even if unconscious, is conceivable outside the permutations authorized by language.” (p. 448)

Back to the problem of the 'Mirror Stage', in Lacan's essay (The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience) explained about the functionality or the background of the occurrence of the imitation/mimic phase,

“The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmental body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic –and lastly to the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.” (p.444)

 The usage of the word "armor" as having an implicit meaning that mimetic or mimicry or mockery is performed as an effort to establish identity, but really it's just a business for people who do want to feel safe / protected in an environment because by imitating other people (who are in the same or different environments) then the perpetrators of mimicry would assume that he is equal to those as the imitated object and it could be used to avoid social sanctions such as excluded or considered odd if he is different from his own, is not the same / similar to people who exist and share the same environment with).

However, the mimicry has consequences to be borne either by the person who does it as well as by people in the surrounding areas, such as the Bhaba adopt from Weber's that,               

“The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing.” (p.126)

Because besides mimicry is the sign of a double articulation, mimicry also a sign of the inappropriate so, however, they were made efforts to get recognition for an identity that they fethisised, it will not happen. On the contrary, it will only make his identity more complicated because the process of mimicry/mimetic arising from the existence of a variety of ambivalence that tried, but could not be removed because its nature that cannot be changed / permanent. 

WORK CITED:

Bhabha, Homi. 1984. “Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” in October, Vol. 28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis (Spring, 1984; pp.125-133). The MIT Press retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/778467

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. 2005. The Backward Place. Great Britain: John Murray (Publishers)

Lacan, Jacques. 1957. “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud” in Literary Theory: An Anthology ed. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael (2004, 2nd edition; pg. 447-460). United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing.

Lacan, Jacques. 1966. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in Literary Theory: An Anthology ed. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael (2004, 2nd edition; pg. 441-446). United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing.