 Let's look at subjectivity. Subjectivity refers to ideas about self-hood, perhaps one of the oldest questions ever pondered by humanity is that of, who am I? At times this seems painfully obvious, for instance I might say I'm a white middle-class female with an interest in cats, theatre and cake, but isn't that just a mix of the way culture has been set up to define me with some interest thrown in? Does that really capture the essence of a person? And if we can reduce a person to their race, class, gender, health and ethnicity, in which they have been positioned by society, then can we speak of a true self at all? Donald Hall writes that, indeed, we live in an era in which we are commonly asked to rethink, express and explain our identities by a wide variety of authority figures and institutions like our parents, even talk show hosts and advertisers who encourage us to test out a different form of self-expression by purchasing an expensive car or trying out a new hair colour. We are widely led to believe that we have the freedom and ability to recreate and create ourselves at will if we have the will, but then at the same time we're presented with this suspiciously narrow range of options and avenues that will allow us to fit comfortably into society and our particular gendered regional ethnic sexual subset of it. And therein lies the dilemma. In an era of extreme individualisation, tailored apps and personal story, are our subjectivities still just made up as a sheer coincidence of where and when we were born? To answer this question, let's first look at the way that subjectivity and notions of selfhood have been traced by Western thinking. Let's go back to the Enlightenment period, which is generally thought as ranging from the 17th to the 19th centuries and centred in Europe. René Descartes was the big man on campus during this time and he posited one of the most famous phrases in philosophy, cogito ergo sum, or I think therefore I am. Descartes wrote in 1637, As I wanted to concentrate solely on the search for truth, I thought I ought to reject as being absolutely false everything in which I could suppose even the slightest reason for doubt in order to see if there did not remain after that anything in my belief, which was entirely doubtable. So in other words, the only thing we can really be sure of, says, is that we are a being experiencing a thought. It was a radical shift in thinking, but it set Western philosophy on a new trajectory. As we come out of the period of the Enlightenment and into the 19th and early 20th century, the notion of subjectivity shifts to a radically political project as events like the French Revolution in 1789 and a new focus on women's rights make way for new ideas about what is important in terms of understanding the self and understanding the selfhood of others. As Donald Hall explains, the French Revolution of 1789 was an event of unparalleled magnitude as it signalled a dramatically expanding consciousness of class oppression and the causes and consequences of violent revolution. At roughly the same time, a small but vocal group of women began to question openly the norms of gender identity and the social beliefs justifying the prejudicial treatment of one half of humankind. So throughout this time, it becomes quite clear that understanding subjectivity must include an understanding of the ways in which individuals are constructed by and through social positioning systems. For instance, being marked as black is only marked as a category because of the insistence of its difference from the dominant racial category of white. And this leads us to the writing of Professor Stuart Hall, a cultural theorist who joined the famous Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. Hall believed identity to be an ongoing product of history and culture rather than a finished product. Our selfhood and the way our very self is positioned in our culture is constantly shifting and absolutely constructed, generally by the dominant rule in class. But why do these subjects positions feel so real? Well, Stuart Hall says the fact that we project ourselves into these cultural identities at the same time internalising their meanings and values, making them part of us, helps us to align our subjective feelings with the objective places we occupy in the social and current world. This idea brings us to the contemporary setting in which identity has been said to undergo a crisis of sorts. Stuart Hall writes that this loss of a stable sense of self is sometimes called the dislocation or de-centering of the subject. Because after all, what can we really know is us? And this is one of the most insistent concerns of the current era, which is often referred to as post-modernity, generally considered to have emerged during the 1960s with these kinds of questions. As Donald Hall writes, in the postmodern era, subjectivity, once considered potentially knowable and conceptually one-dimensional, has been rendered various, fractured and indefinite in recent theorisations. What is the self, he asks? But what is a self? In order to approach these kinds of questions in light of new technologies, which sometimes seem to cross the very border of what is organically us and what is not, is Donald Haraway. Donald calls Haraway one of the most evocable proponents of using this ongoing, deepening and interfacing of humans and technology as the occasion to rethink subjectivity in radical, but at the same time ethically responsible ways. Haraway's most famous piece, reprinted numerous times after its first publication in 1985, is called A Cyborg Manifesto. And in it, she argues that in the late 20th century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism. In short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology. It gives us our politics. For Donald Hall, interpolations, that is, the ways in which individuals are hailed into ideology in order to fit in with that ideology, and other processes of subject creation are numerous, always partial, often recurring and reinforced. So is that it? Are we doomed to uphold and repeat only that which ideology allows us? Well, not necessarily. As Donald Hall also points out, these processes of subject creation are also potentially lapsing. Those lapses can be forced and temporary as one might experience in the use of drugs or music or dance, or they can be more unexpected but temporally significant as might occur through encounters with illness or trauma. He says that we must recognise these lapses and understand that if identity is not fixed, well, that can be liberating too, because it means, after all, there is room to move and think, and perhaps thinking is the most powerful process of all.