THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

3.2 Double Whammy: Mixed Doubles The Avatar in Panamaand interactions with the individual will consequently be real ones. 110With the various strategies of identity contibuting to the double’sincarnation or at the very least its potential outlined, the distinctionsbetween modern and postmodern selfhood should be scrutinised.Modern and Postmodern SelvesPostmodern ideas of identity seem to breach every aspect ofLaing’s definition. Modern identity is elaborated to become postmodernyet one does not necessarily exclude the other. Anthony Elliot andZygmunt Bauman view modernity and post modernity as products of thepresent era and see the creation and existence of modern andpostmodern selves as simultaneous ways of cohabiting. Bauman doesnot believe postmodernism should be considered beyond modernity ascontemporary culture avoids fixed identities and employs bothsimultaneously. Thus, these strategies should not be seen asalternatives; as postmodernism eclipsing the modern, but as anamalgamation and displacement of modern and postmodern states ofmind. 111 Modernity involved challenging previous assumptions, traditionsand customs, and a search for foundations. Postmodernity has donethe same although its emphasis has been on plurality and multiplicity.Bauman argues that society is capable of accommodating both: themodern creating of order, boundaries, and the postmodern tolerance forplurality, difference and uncertainty. 112 Postmodernism suggests thecontinuance of ambiguity and discontinuity and holds that society andculture cannot be ordered and controlled (7). Rather than the modernistview of the artist or character being decentred, postmodernismperceives society as decentered with historical images framed fromdifferent points of view. This notion seems to be a variation on thetheme of Freud’s mystic writing pad in which Freud suggests remainingimpressions (of original images), in psychoanalytical terms, can belikened to fantasies which are located at the level of the repressedunconscious. Like the unconscious fantasy, these impressions arefragmented, multiple, and discontinuous; they come to influence and attimes distort succeeding scripts (palimpsest), and they remain legible insuitable lights. 113The modern concepts of anxiety and alienation becomeinappropriate in the postmodern world as the latter is displaced by the110 Jean Baudrillard, “The Evil Demons of Images and the Precession of Simulacra”,Postmodernism: A Reader ed. Thomas Docherty (Hertforshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf,1993) 194-199. 197-198.111 Elliott, Concepts of the Self 150.112 Elliott, Subject to Ourselves 21.113 See “A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad”, Standard Edition, Vol. 19, 227-234.217