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What is it, Identity?

Yohji Yamamoto + Wim Wenders • 1989

ANotebook on Cities and Clothes, Wim Wenders, 1989. A documentary film about Yohji Yamamoto.

CThe Fashion axis according to the cultural-sociological view of Abraham Moles. 1968.

EIdentity is marketed in national capitalism as a property. It is something you can purchase, or purchase a relation to. Or it is something you already own that you can express: my masculinity, my queerness. But identity need not be simply a caption for an image of an unchangeable concrete self. It is also a theory of the future, of history.

– Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, 1997

G Wim Wenders Which cities do you like, Yohji? Yohji Yamamoto Which cities ? I like all big cities. I was born in Tokyo and l like to consider myself less of a Japanese than a Tokyoite. I prefer this. Tokyo has no nationality. Especially people of my generation, especially those who were born in Tokyo and other urbane areas, have the feeling of not belonging to any nation. l like this feeling of being independent.

JWe will change nothing in the situation of the peoples of the world, if we do not change the belief that identity must be rooted, fixed, exclusive, and unaccommodating.

— Édouard Glissant

LAdorno coined the term "identity thinking" to refer to that form of thinking which is the most expressive philosophical manifestation of power and domination. Drawing a contrast between his own form of dialectical thinking and identity thinking, Adorno wrote that "dialectics seeks to say what something is, while identarian thinking says what something comes under, what it exemplifies or represents, and what, accordingly, it is not itself."

https://www.sfu.ca/~jaradul/identity

NErving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1956

QAldo Rossi, The Analogous City, Collage, 1977

Conceived as a genuine urban project, The Analogous City displays an aggregation of architectures drawn from collective and personal memories.

cf. Kierkegaard's Crop Rotation Method.

S'I' and the 'me', George Herbert Mead.

The erasure of the personality is the fatal accompaniment to an existence which is concretely submissive to the spectacle's rules, ever more removed from the possibility of authentic experience and thus from the discovery of individual preferences. Paradoxically, permanent self-denial is the price the individual pays for the tiniest bit of social status.

— Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 1988

VWe all have two lives: The real one, which is the one we dreamed when we were children, And which we continue to dream as adults, in a substratum of mist; The false one is the life we live in the company of others, Which is the practical, the useful life, The one where they end up putting us in a coffin.

— Alvaro de Campos / Fernando Pessoa

XListen closely...

Wim Wenders: AYou live wherever you live, you do whatever work you do, you talk however you talk, you eat whatever you eat, B you wear whatever clothes you wear, C you look at whatever images you see… D

YOU’RE LIVING HOWEVER YOU CAN YOU ARE WHOEVER YOU ARE

“Identity”… of a person E of a thing, F of a place. G

HDick Higgins, Thirteen Serious Considerations (8), 1978

DH: “The old artist worries who he is: the new one observes shemself among the shoes, and makes a work of it.” — An Exemplativist Manifesto (1976)

“Identity”. I The word itself gives me shivers. It rings of calm, comfort, contentedness. What is it, identity? J To know where you belong? To know your self worth? K To know who you are? L How do you recognize identity? We are creating an image of ourselves, M we are attempting to resemble this image… Is that what we call identity? The accord between the image we have created of ourselves and . . . ourselves? Just who is that, “ourselves”? N

OEduardo Paolozzi, "Wittgenstein in New York", 1964

We live in the cities. The cities live in us… P time passes. We move from one city to another, Q from one country to another. We change languages, we change habits, we change opinions, we change clothes, R we change everything. Everything changes. And fast. S Images above all. T

UWenders uses a Yohji dress in the final scene of Wings of Desire in 1987.

Wenders makes Cities on Notebooks and Clothes about Yohji in 1989.

Damiel, Angel over Berlin: When the child was a child, V It was the time for these questions: Why am I me, and why not you? W Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? Is life under the sun not just a dream? Is what I see and hear and smell not just the reflection of a world before the world? Is there really such a thing as evil, and people who really are the Bad Guys? X

How can it be that the I, who I am, didn’t exist before I came to be, and that, someday, the I who I am, will no longer be who I am? Y

ZHistory adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: “I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.” The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: “Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.”

— Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing”

BHans Hollein, MAN transFORMS: Aspects of Design, 1976. View of ‘Variation On A Basic Item: Bread’

DImages no longer represent the world, images are now articulations of thought. They are not copies but projections, models. So a new attitude toward the image is necessary… *

+ Magic is an attitude which instead of taking images to orient oneself in the world, takes the world to orient oneself in the image. *

– Vilém Flusser

FOur products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.

— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

IIdentity is the identity of identity and non-identity

— Hegel

KNot in that he leaves something behind him, but in that he works and enjoys and stirs others to work and enjoyment, does man's importance lie.

— Goethe

Epigraph in Otto Rank's Art and Artist, 1932, Chapter Thirteen “Success and Fame“.

MWe are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.

— Otto Neurath (Neurath's boat)

PIf the poet you'd understand, You must go into the poet's land.

— Goethe