Sod it. I am going to post this, partly to wind-up gently tease Widowwadwam and provoke her to propose me for Pseud's Corner (a friend has made it there - I'd love to join that distinguished company).
I saw a great piece of art touching on some of this the other day.
It was a woman's face, made up of hundreds of little badges, each depicting an image of mass-produced femininity/political and social identity.
Badges, of course, occupy that internecine position between individuation and mass-production: they ambivalently portray the late-capitalist "individual's" struggle to affirm/assemble their singular identity through a bricolage of objects ready-made, and signify the sense that, within an all-pervasive consumer-capitalist culture, identities must be chosen and assembled - with the consequent sense of fracture and aporia (the "space" between the badges) from amongst pre-exisiting things/identities. the element of "prodction" is transferred to this choosing and assembling. An ambivalent melancholy haunts the assembled identity, as a ghostly sense of non-wholeness and incongruency between the assemblage and the ideal towards which this aims.
Whether this sense of haunting melancholy should be read as marking the inauthenticity of identity in consumerist capital or as signifying a bad-faith nostalgia for late-nineteenth/early twentieth-century discourses of political emancipation of course depends on the subject's political/social beliefs.
It was good.
And the joke was that all the badges were hand-made.