Here is a list of selected quotes on and around the theme of ‘Identity’, and of course it’s relationship to art. I’ve built this quotation resource over the last 5 years, and will continue to add more quotations from a broad range of media and authors as I come across them. If you would like to share any of your favourite Identity quotes please add them as comments on this page.
Note: The quotes listed here are intended for academic purposes. I would strongly recommend you purchase the respective works if you have an interest in this area, to gain a wider appreciation of the context from which the quotation is taken.
“The phrase ‘the definition of self’ is dangerously misleading—the self is not a fixed thing, it’s constantly changing. Thus we will be talking about self as a function as opposed to an identity”
(Judy DeLozier, Turtles All the Down: Prerequisites to Personal Genius)
“Amidst much celebration of a deconstruction or liberation from identities fixed in bodies, often traced to modern materialism and scientism, cyberlibertarianism nonetheless also seems to proclaim the technical realization of the Enlightenment dream of mind/body dualism, and a liberation of mind from body”
(Lupton, 1995)
“First, the ideas of virtuality and simulation evoke the construction of a space of representation that can be related to ‘as if ’ it were real, and therefore effects a separation from, or even replacement of, the ‘really real’. It therefore contrasts with several terms that might characterize the offline world: ‘real’, ‘actual’ and ‘material’ being the central ones”
(Shields, 2000)
“If the culture produces an art that’s totally conscious, or if a culture produces an art that’s totally unconscious, it’s not going to be great art. Because art always appeals to multi-levels. Great art always appeals to multi-levels and their integration.”
(Judy DeLozier, Turtles All the Down: Prerequisites to Personal Genius)
“After well over two hours he suddenly looked up toward the ceiling and remarked with puzzled emphasis, “I say, Milton, this is an extraordinary contretemps. We don’t know you. You do not belong here. You are sitting on the edge of a ravine watching both of us, and neither of us knows which one is talking to you; and we are in the vestibule looking at each other with most extraordinary interest. We know that you are someone who can determine our identity, and most extraordinarily we are both sure we know it and that the other is not really so, but merely a mental image of the past or of the future. But you must resolve it despite time and distances and even though we do not know you. I say, this is an extraordinarily fascinating predicament: Am I he or is he me?”
(Milton H. Erickson, A Special Inquiry with Aldous Huxley into the Nature and Character of Various States of Consciousness)
“Remember what Judy read yesterday about how if a culture makes a commitment, an unbalanced commitment, to all conscious or all unconscious activity in their art, then it is unlikely their art will be great? That’s true personally as well. Unless you have a dance between first and second attention —and you know how fluid you have to be in a dance—it’s unlikely that you’ll achieve … personal genius”
(John Grinder, Turtles All the Down: Prerequisites to Personal Genius)
“The body is indeed becoming more problematic as the essential ground of identity: it is indeed becoming more cyborg and merged with technology, revealed as performance, reconstructed through feminism and new sexualities. It is precisely because various new technologies such as the Internet make the body problematic that people exaggerate, rather than abandon, gender. The response is not an embrace of new possibilities but an attempt to act out these threatened identities on an intensified scale through a renewed assertion of mind over body.”
(Don Slater, Social Relationships & Identity)
“Attention, as you have no doubt guessed, is another name for “I” and the states which can be differentially achieved through the disciplined and skillful employment of attention are the range of human possibility. “I,” or attention, is a function, which is defined on the lattice and can operate to produce states ranging from the demon-like narrow-focused, sensory-based states of the racecar driver to the sensory independent, future-oriented states of the corporate planner. Each of these states has its model of the world—all of them subject to the epistemological considerations we’re developing here. Now what is the relationship between attention and disassociation? That’s right—they’re inverses—one is the flip side of the other.”
(John Grinder, Turtles All the Down: Prerequisites to Personal Genius)
“I see each character as a separate part of me. I can separate one aspect of my being out and then put it in front of me and then look at it. And it’s kind of like all of these things are inside me at once, battling each other. And at certain points one is dominant.”
Trenton Doyle Hancock
“Studying the internet as a culture means regarding it as a social space in it’s own right, rather than a complex object used within other, contextualising spaces. It means looking at the forms of communication, sociality and identity that are produced within this social space, and how they are sustained using the resources available within the online setting.”
(Don Slater, Social Relationships & Identity)
“R.D. Laing is well known for remarking that schizophrenia is a congruent response to a highly fragmented technical society—we have criticized Laing with tongue in cheek for being so conservative—schizophrenia gives a person only two models—we’ve insisted in the past on multiple personality or parts as a minimum requirement for dealing with a fragmented technical society. This new proposal is a more radical critique—it proposes not fragmented parts—but a balanced personal organization in which the individual can occupy any set of circuits within the lattice of human possibility”
(John Grinder, Turtles All the Down: Prerequisites to Personal Genius)
“Meta Programs are just one of the ways we maintain our identities by either preserving or breaking down the generalizations that we make over time. Since knowing someone’s Meta Programs can actually help you closely predict his states, they can be used to predict behavior—their actions. In addition, we can change the ways a person filters information for a certain purpose.”
(Tad James, Timeline Therapy and the Basis of Personality)
“What has been said so far proposes questions about any particular work of art somewhat different from those which have been conventionally asked by anthropologists. The “culture and personality school,” for example, has traditionally used pieces of art or ritual as samples or probes to reveal particular psychological themes or states. The question has been: Does the art tell us about what sort of person made it?”
(John Grinder, Turtles All the Down: Prerequisites to Personal Genius)
“The deep trance state, he asserted, he now knew to be another and entirely different category of experience. External reality could enter, but it acquired a new kind of subjective reality, a special reality of a new and different significance entirely. For example, while I had been included in part in his deep trance state, it was not as a specific person with a specific identity. Instead I was known only as someone whom he (Huxley) knew in some vague and unimportant and completely unidentified relationship. Aside from my “reality” there existed the type of reality that one encounters in vivid dreams, a reality that one does not question. Instead one accepts such reality completely without intellectual questioning, and there are no conflicting contrasts nor judgmental comparisons nor contradictions, so that whatever is subjectively experienced is unquestioningly accepted as both subjectively and objectively genuine and in keeping with all else.”
(Milton H. Erickson, A Special Inquiry with Aldous Huxley into the Nature and Character of Various States of Consciousness)
“I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be”
(Lucian Freud)
“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best”
(Frida Kahlo)
