P[03]Discourse
on Trends

Where are our identities best expressed? Will we reach a point in time where a modified reality is normative? Have we reached that point already? Instead of naively trying to answer these questions, this project entailed an engagement with, analysis of, and critical reflection upon the key contemporary discourses on authenticity as they are manifested in culture, to map future scenarios and trends on identity.

[01]
A shift towards fluidity in the discourse of authenticity in gender, sexual, and racial identity is generating a new structure of power and knowledge.

[02]
As technology continues to dilute the lines between physical and digital space and persona, this shift towards more fluid behaviours and attitudes will become a macro trend in other arenas, thus reshaping our conception of ourselves.

[03]
Different levels of acceptance or refusal of this shift and the technologies that bring it will generate archetypical identities, each one offering attached market opportunities.

From a semiotic perspective, authenticity can be understood as a floating signifier, as it is a symbol without explicit referents such as an object or an agreed upon meaning. Floating signifiers are a key element in areas such as branding or political communication. The meaning of these “empty” signifiers can vary over time and space, as they are built over different discursive formations.

A multiplicity of terms, symbols, or even spaces, have been hegemonic to authenticity in different physical and historical locations. Some of these meanings, symbols, and locations are clearly antagonistic. How do changes in the hegemonic discourse of authenticity and its representation occur?

These two antagonistic discourses on authenticity were generated by a common process that presents a previous state of things as authentic. Such phenomena are detected in the work of social anthropologist Adam Kuper (1988), who describes the previous state of things as “primitive society,” and deconstructs it as a discursive formation that works within the framework of “reflexive modernisation.”

How do new discourses on authenticity appear as a consequence of modernisation, and how do they influence the evolution of other discourses within the same epistemological regime?

Tool 1 defines innovation (modernisation) as the disruptive element that generates changes in the epistemic common sense allowing the production and adoption of new discourses. To forecast what authenticity could look like in a future episteme, one must define the disruptive innovations affecting our world and the new possibilities that the mentioned innovations would produce. In-depth research on innovations such as virtual reality, augmented reality, nanorobotics suggests that in the near future, the line that separates the virtual and physical world will blur, and with it self identity and the perception of what is authentic. This epistemic change corresponds to a process of assimilation as represented in the evolved version of Tool 1

In addition to the above-mentioned tool, a parallelism with the evolution of the discourses of gender identity was used to forecast the general trend on fluidity as the core value of the new episteme. While new surgical techniques on sexual reassignment generated discourses on gender performativity, new techniques on virtual and augmented reality and nanorobotics will enable new discourses on authenticity as identity evolves into something that transcends physical conditions and limitations, and blurs into the digital world.