Jones—Critalogic Questions

I thought that Carlone and Taylor's move toward a production and consumption dialect was interesting. There are different ways that the relationship plays out depending on which combination of organization, culture, organizational subjectivities, and cultural subjectivies you're reading about. For example in the organization-organizational subjectivities relationship, the authors explain "that beyond their official manufacture of goods and services, organizations produce discourses of identity" (p. 343). These discourses (and they can be cultural discourses in another relationship) are consumed (and later different one are produced) by people creating and articulating their subjectivity.

1. What are the consequences of conceptualizing this process in terms of 'production' and 'consumption'? These terms are drawn from the consumerist, technical, instrumental sphere—are there elements of this co-constructive process that are lost by using such language? What could be an alternative metaphor?

 

In both Carlone and Taylor (1998) and Taylor (2005), the pieces write about hyper- forms of perception. Carlone and Taylor discuss Disney World's construction of a 'hyperculture' that "promotes an apolitical, utopian, ethnocentric, and infantilized experience" (p. 346). Taylor explains that in the postmodern age, we see a rise in "global media systems" that produce "hyper-realities with no 'real' reference" (p. 116-117). It seems to me that these types of messages might be one of the reasons that Taylor then concludes that identity "is the effect of discourses that construct and enforce preferred narratives for understanding the self, other, and world" (p. 117).

2. If identity is the 'result' of hyper-realities, then how do we make sense of human agency? Where do we claim a position from which we can speak and resist? While I am not toally comfortable with the use of 'production' and 'consumption' as our conceptual framework, it at least appears to be dialogic and clearly open to an active subject. How might we reframe Taylor's (postmodern) discussion of identity to open a space for a subjective agent?