Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk - Rooms of Identity

Introduction:

Let me begin by saying something about specific parts of Foucault’s body of work. Foucault’s work explores the parameters of what he calls the “human sciences,” that academic field in which humanistic and social science discourses construct knowledge and subjectivity. He analyzes how various institutions (psychiatric clinics, prisons, schools, and so forth) produce bodies of knowledge in and through which people are disciplined into becoming modern subjects. In this process Foucault has shown how knowledge and power are inextricably bound and wielded as biopolitics. He explains how power in modernity is biopolitical; it is not merely about a simple top-down subjugation, rather biopolitics exceeds the traditional juridical-political order by pervading the bodies and lives of its subjects.

In his later work, Foucault devotes himself to the issue of “the ethics of self.” Ethics here, however, does not simply mean and individual’s morals. Foucault is interested in identifying the “technologies” of the self, the regulated forms of behavior that constitute a particular human subject. Such technologies, which include sexual, political, legal, educational, and religious patterns of behavior, may be taken for granted or even go completely unnoticed by the subject who is constituted by them. Nonetheless, they function to discipline the body and mind within a larger order of power-knowledge. Technologies of the self are subjecting practices that create and shape one’s sense of self. These practices are not universal, but variable over time and place. Foucault demonstrates that these technologies of the self are practices which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (“Technologies of the Self,” p. 146)

The following pages feature an interview with Foucault, entitled “The Eye of Power”. In this interview he discusses and considers various institutions (mainly prison architecture) - the fields marked green index a specific focus on how the individual functions and manifests itself within these various institutions. For the exhibition “Rooms of Identity” I want to take this text and parts of Foucault's theory into consideration, or more as point of departure to apply rather literally on the living environment of individuals that are arguably part of the Indie scene.
Here, Foucault’s theory serves to illustrate the limitations of individual freedom. The agency of the human subject, although the ideology of the agency is rejected by Foucault, is shaped or predefined by structures within society. The room (of identity) is in that sense a metaphor for the human body, in which the subject is imprisoned or trapped. The posters (labels of identity) that one could mount on the walls of their room hereby serve as a metaphor for the items that society makes available to individuals. In short, your individual freedom to act, your agency, is limited to make choices from a censored range of items, a set of rules, provided by higher powers, namely the structures within society - such as the government and the corporations.

In my opinion the Indie scene is to an high extend culturally bound, hereby I mean to say that both the cultural and the "subcultural capital" of the Indie scene, and, on an individual level, the "mattering maps" of the individual, are strongly influenced by the visual culture and its commercial manifestations. The commercial aspect manifests itself by an existent human urge, either conscious or sub- / unconscious, to appropriate items of desire into their rooms of identity. Consequently, comparable, although significantly different living environments emerge - distinct by a matter of taste, as variations on a theme. Commonplaces in the construction of the living environment are the arts, music, fashion, magazines, movies, and so forth. This exhibition is intended to showcase several examples of "Indie" living environments, in order to reflect on their lifestyles, the image of the occupant, and so forth.
It should be mentioned that I am well aware of the fact that this exhibition is a categorization, simply by using "Indie living environments", a predetermined set of imagery based on value judgements, in short, a stereotypical selection. The depicted did not declare to be Indie, they were identified as Indie, chosen to fit a theoretical framework. To what extent can subcultural studies, seeking its balance between critical theory and participant observation, derive objective judgements from frieze frames? Bearing this question in mind, this exhibition, this "day at the zoo", serves as a discussion opener. Not as a means to an end, but rather as a notch to further stress and examine the implications that the observation and analysis of style and appearance within (sub)cultural studies put forward.

Selection: