WRITING IDENTITY - A SAMPLER

Stoppard

The trouble with concentrating on the specific is that it leads to delusions of grandeur.

There is a scene in the film Shakespeare In Love (1998) (written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard) which has the following dialogue:

(The company of actors are about to put on Romeo and Juliet. A young girl is questioning one of the actors)

Girl: So what's this play about then?

Man playing nurse: Well, there's this nurse...

This same attitude applies to most everything with which we are individually concerned. It is that thing with which we currently identify. Any scholar’s subject is the centre of his or her world. It is from that particular perspective an individual tends to develop theories concerning the world and everything in it. So it is with performance writing.  When I consider the scope of performance writing in relation to the matter of identity, any form of textual display signifying identity will fall within that compass. Indeed any display signifying identity will do and every signifier becomes a form of text. That ‘text’ can be written in any number of languages, some of which are more universal than others. This notion is of particular importance when considering the question of identity. Accepting that writing is performative is part of that notion. ‘Texts’ do things. 

Butler

To give an example of where I am going with this, I turn to Judith Butler. As to the question of gender, she argues that gender is performative, “...that is, a sense of gender identity for an individual or group develops from actions such as wearing certain clothes (skirts and dresses for women, ties and jackets for men), engaging in certain rituals (such as marriage), taking certain jobs (fewer women on construction sites) and employing certain mannerisms; there is no natural, true, or innate essence of gender, or for that matter any other identity.” For Butler identity is “performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be it results”.

Derrida

The clothes a person wears are clues to their particular choice of identity. We can ‘read’ from the colours, the materials, the cut and style of their clothing not only what gender they purport to be, but many other aspects of their particular personality. Each item of clothing on display is a textual display. It is a performing text. Dressing is a means of writing identity just as much as billboards, numbers on houses, car registration numbers and any other method of textual display. As Jacques Derrida proposes “there is nothing outside the text”.

So when you next hear an actor say “Well there’s this nurse…” you can identity with Romeo or Juliet, or whatever you happen to be wearing at the time.

IDENTITY IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE?

In the continuing search for music and identity I have come across a book by three authors David J. Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell and Raymond MacDonald.

Hargreaves

Miell

Professor David Hargreaves is Professor of Education (amongst many other things) at University of Roehampton; Professor Dorothy Miell is Vice Principal and Head of the College of Humanities and Social Science at The University of Edinburgh (no doubt knows Miss Keelin Murray - see blog 6^th Feb 2013 Music and Identity) and Professor Raymond MacDonald is Professor of Music Psychology and Improvisation at Glasgow Caledonian University School of Health and Life Sciences.

MacDonald

Their work is entitled What Are Musical Identities and Why Are They So Important? In their précis of the book they state, inter alia:

“ 'Nicholas Cook, in Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998 - Oxford University Press) states succinctly: ‘In today’s world, deciding what music to listen to is a significant part of deciding and announcing to people not just who you “want to be” . . . but who you are. “Music” is a very small word to encompass something that takes as many forms as there are cultural or sub-cultural identities'.

This concept of identity enables us to look at the widespread and varied interactions between music and the individual. The concepts of identity and the self have undergone some radical changes in psychological theory in recent years, to which we will return later in this chapter. The idea of the self   as a kind of focus, or relatively unchanging core aspect of individuals’ personalities, has given way to a much less static and more dynamic view of the self as something which is constantly being reconstructed and renegotiated according to the experiences, situations and other people with whom we interact in everyday life. Globalization and technological advance have led to rapid recent changes in many people’s lifestyles, and our self-identities are changing correspondingly in ever more complex ways.

This book is about the role that music plays in this process, and we introduce the concept of musical identities as a crucial means of doing so.”

As you can see, my proposal of writing identity in conjunction with music is out of time. Do I go on? Professor Hargreaves comments that the object of a Phd, in exploring a particular subject, is to provide some new incite into what has been done before. One has to know what has been done to know what is new. That is why it takes so long to develop a thesis. I have some doubts about my perspective of identity from the point of view of ‘performance writing’.

If you can imagine standing at the top of the Grand Canyon observing the landscape:

If you were to move one inch to the left or right, would you be looking at a different landscape? The performance writer would say that you were, indeed you would be looking at a different landscape every time you blinked. So perhaps my take on the writing of music and identity will be a mere blink of some new insight. Do I go on?

TEXT SPEAK

It is interesting how a simple display of letters can identify an entire sequence of events. With the announcement by Moody’s Corporation – Investors Service that the United Kingdom’s credit rating has lost its triple A credit rating, the above picture becomes significant and identifies a story of economic disarray.  It also puts into the spotlight the Moody’s Corporation which claims to be an essential component of the global capital markets, providing credit ratings, research, tools and analysis that contribute to transparent and integrated financial markets. What makes this company such a powerful organisation? Here are the people responsible, Moody’s Standing Committee on Rating Symbols and Definitions:

Kenneth Emery - Chair & Senior Vice President, Credit Policy Group

Richard Cantor - Chief Credit Officer, Moody’s Investors Service

Henry Charpentier - Managing Director, Structured Finance Group

Jack Dorer - Managing Director, US Public Finance Group

David Fanger - Senior Vice President, Financial Institutions Group

Joseph Grohotolski - Vice President, Senior Compliance Officer

Matthew Jones - Senior Vice President, U.S. Public Finance Group

John Kriens - Vice President, Information Technology

Marie Menendez - Senior Vice President, Corporate Finance Group

Bart Oosterveld - Managing Director, Sovereign Risk Group

David Rosa - Senior Vice President, Credit Policy Group

Russell Solomon - Senior Vice President, Corporate Finance Group

Celina Vansetti-Hutchins - Managing Director, Financial Institutions Group

Alastair Wilson - Chief Credit Officer, Europe

The Company goes on to state:

The system of rating securities was originated by John Moody in 1909. The purpose of Moody's ratings is to provide investors with a simple system of gradation by which future relative creditworthiness of securities may be gauged.

Gradations of creditworthiness are indicated by rating symbols, with each symbol representing a group in which the credit characteristics are broadly the same. There are nine symbols as shown below, from that used to designate least credit risk to that denoting greatest credit risk:

Aaa Aa A Baa Ba B Caa Ca C

Aaa Obligations rated Aaa are judged to be of the highest quality, subject to the lowest level of credit risk.

Aa Obligations rated Aa are judged to be of high quality and are subject to very low credit risk.

A Obligations rated A are judged to be upper-medium grade and are subject to low credit risk.

Baa Obligations rated Baa are judged to be medium-grade and subject to moderate credit risk and as such may possess certain speculative characteristics.

Ba Obligations rated Ba are judged to be speculative and are subject to substantial credit risk.

B Obligations rated B are considered speculative and are subject to high credit risk.

Caa Obligations rated Caa are judged to be speculative of poor standing and are subject to very high credit risk.

Ca Obligations rated Ca are highly speculative and are likely in, or very near, default, with some prospect of recovery of principal and interest.

C Obligations rated C are the lowest rated and are typically in default, with little prospect for recovery of principal or interest.

Note: Moody’s appends numerical modifiers 1, 2, and 3 to each generic rating classification from Aa through Caa. The modifier 1 indicates that the obligation ranks in the higher end of its generic rating category; the modifier 2 indicates a mid-range ranking; and the modifier 3 indicates a ranking in the lower end of that generic rating category. Additionally, a “(hyb)” indicator is appended to all ratings of hybrid securities issued by banks, insurers, finance companies, and

securities firms.

Global Short-Term Rating Scale

P-1 Issuers (or supporting institutions) rated Prime-1 have a superior ability to repay short-term debt

obligations.

P-2 Issuers (or supporting institutions) rated Prime-2 have a strong ability to repay short-term debt

obligations.

P-3 Issuers (or supporting institutions) rated Prime-3 have an acceptable ability to repay short-term

obligations.

NP Issuers (or supporting institutions) rated Not Prime do not fall within any of the Prime rating

categories.

The following table indicates the long-term ratings consistent with different short-term ratings when such long-term ratings exist:

The credit quality of most issuers and their obligations is not fixed and steady over a period of time, but tends to undergo change. For this reason changes in ratings occur so as to reflect variations in the intrinsic relative position of issuers and their obligations.

A change in rating may thus occur at any time in the case of an individual issue. Such rating change should serve notice that Moody's observes some alteration in creditworthiness, or that the previous rating did not fully reflect the quality of the bond as now seen. While because of their very nature, changes are to be expected more frequently among bonds of lower ratings than among bonds of higher ratings. Nevertheless, the user of bond ratings should keep close and constant check on all ratings — both high and low — to be able to note promptly any signs of change in status that may occur.

I gather that the fourteen people concerned have detected a change in the credit worthiness of the United Kingdom, but what is the full classification? Is it AA 1, 2 or 3? The picture does not tell the whole story.

Here is a video comment by a young man on the move.

WITNESSING AND POLITICAL IDENTITY

This search for identity I have embarked upon continuously spirals away from the straightforward course I envisaged. I feel as if I am sailing along the outer rim of a Sargasso Sea, straining against a current pulling me closer in to the eye of the whirlpool. The current engagement is with identity politics. This area concerns propositions that focus on the aspirations of particular social interest groups whose political views may be shaped by aspects of their personal identity such as race, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation or some other characteristic. Many groups (African-Americans, Hispanic, Anglo-Indian, Native American etc.) have been actively promoting their political identity for some time. The writing of and about this identity has been with us for some considerable time. The signs and images witnessing the process have been displayed all round us for some time. In the later half of the 20^th century, the most influential of these political identities has been that of gender. The feminist movement has mushroomed in its effect on all western societies and is now a global concern, going behind the Muslim veil, deconstructing the cast system and many other societies and cultures where women have been traditionally subservient. The work of Judith Butler, Helen Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and many others, has been remarkable in its influence.

Minh-Ha

I recently came across the work of Professor Trinh Minh-ha, in particular When the Moon Waxes Red. Representation, gender and cultural politics (Routledge 1991). She is one of these extraordinary women. In an interview in 1993 she stated:

“I rarely think in terms of message. I think more in terms of processes of transformation. Every film that I make, for example, is a transformative process for me. I mean by that that whenever I start a film, I may start with an idea, an image or an impression. By the time I finish the film, lam somewhere else altogether, even though 1 have not lost what I started out with. In the process of making the film your consciousness has changed considerably. 

 It's the same with writing. I am not writing just to give a message, even though in my writings and my films I am always concerned with something that is very specific. For example, the subject that you have deliberately decided to focus on would be the site around which your energy would deploy. But, on the other hand, the subject is not all that there is in writing, and in filmmaking. One should always offer the reader and the viewer something else than just the subject. And that something else has to do with writing itself and with the tools that define your activities as a writer or a filmmaker. By focusing on these, you also offer the reader or the viewer your social positioning-how you position yourself as a writer and a filmmaker in society. So these are the issues that I immediately face in writing and in filmmaking.”

There are a couple of other passages from her book Moon Waxes Red:

“An objective constantly claimed by those who ‘seek to reveal one society to another’ is ‘to grasp the native’s point of view’ and “to realise his vision of his world.’ […] The injunction to see things from the native’s point of view speaks for a definite ideology of truth and authenticity; it lies at the centre of every polemical discussion on ‘reality’ in its relation to ‘beauty’ and ‘truth.’…To raise the question of representing the Other is, therefore, to reopen endlessly the fundamental issue of science and art; documentary and fiction; universal and personal; objectivity and subjectivity; masculine and feminine; outside and insider.”

“Whether we choose to concentrate on another culture, or on our own culture, our work will always be cross-cultural. It is bound to be so…not only because of…personal background and historical actualities, but also and above all because of the heterogeneous reality we all live today, in postmodern times – a reality, therefore, that is not a mere crossing from one borderline to the other or that is not merely double, but a reality that involves the crossing of an indeterminate number of borderlines, one that remains multiple in its hyphenation.’

Ms Minh-Ha goes on:

“Multiculturalism does not lead us very far if it remains a question of difference only between one culture and another. Differences should also be understood within the same culture, just as multiculturalism as an explicit condition of our times exists within every self. Intercultural, intersubjective, interdisciplinary. These are some of the keywords that keep circulating in artistic and educational as well as political milieu. To cut across boundaries and borderlines is to live aloud the malaise of categories and labels; it is to resist simplistic attempts at classifying, to resist the comfort of belonging to a classification, and of producing classifiable works.”

I would submit that the textual displays, signs and images, appearing all around us are evidence of identities and give witness to their existence within this multicultural world and the many levels within it.

Here is a film of a talk on witnessing given at the Gender and Women’s Stuidies Department at UC Berkeley, featuring the amazing Professor Patricia J. Williams and Professor Trinh Minh-ha.  Very much worth a view: