The American Ekho

If identity is a revolving door as Hall describes it to be. As an interaction between the individual and its changing surroundings. Therefore historically society has had to create new definitions to identify itself usually in reference to not being another or the “other”. And through this alienation from the whole the other is supposed to embark on “political re-identification” in which the other shifts its social identity. However with in the postmodern capitalist structure that Jameson talks about does this really happen, or does the other in fact over time accept the identity of their otherness to be true and in some ways adapt it as Hall suggests as a way of creating ownership, even though based on a falsity.

In this second portion that we had to read in APEX I found a very disturbing passage in which the narrator is talking about a childhood lego game. I understood that this game Ekho created in the 50’s as the narrator states creates these very one dimensional worlds of the American utopia. However this is not where the fun was in creating these Ekho worlds it was in “Deviating from the blueprints.” These possible deviations allowed for personal “morals and prejudices and genetic predisposition to certain illness” to manifest themselves out side of the utopian world that was the Ekho directions in an isolated arena that did not effect the “sterling HMO” but manifested in the dark reality of the “hospital without a waiting room, or one equipped with a particularly large morgue.”

When a new political identity is created it is not created in the sense to call into being a group that is apart of the whole social identity but in fact one that must be isolated for fear that it may contaminate and shed light on the dark corners of the Ekho Village. This hegemonic form of Ekho was okay because everyone stayed in their area, the reality was left to the imagination and the imagination became the reality. This game as capitalist product is in some ways the exact definition of Jameson’s idea of postmodernity, in which their is a comodification of a false nostalgic history that is emulated as reality and the real history if sold as imagination.

Now Hall says that from this alienation the group of the other is supposed to then come together to work against and recreate their identity against the hegemonic identity that was created for them, which I guess is signified by the “counterculture, the political tumult” that then forced the American Ekho to readjust to the new social norms. Hear I agree with Hall in that the masses can effect the depiction of itself, however as Jameson notes the real genius of the Postmodern capitalism is its ability to induce hegemony through comodification of culture. So then the Ekho is now made to include “brown bulbs (that were no too brown) and yellow bulbs (that corresponded to some hypothetical Asian skin pigment) according to ratios informed by sales research.” This is the effected political change that the other creates with in the social hegemony, in which multiplicity is marketed in the nostalgia of the old identities that are now placed into the American Ekho dream that they never existed in. For their reality is still in the imagination of the isolated deviation that no one see because the ones that are seen assimilate to the dream whose “values” are constant, with a different face.