Identity Through Negative Dialectics: Analyzing Media’s Cultural Role in Rewriting Global Identities

In an era shaped by algorithmic saturation and global media flows, identity can no longer be understood as a stable category but must be theorized as a dynamic, dialectical process. This article explores the construction of identity through media by engaging Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics alongside contemporary media aesthetics and sociological critique. It proposes a five-stage analytical model—comprising aesthetic mediation, subject-object oscillation, experiential rupture, dialectical reconstruction, and open-ended identity outcome—that conceptualizes media not as a neutral transmitter, but as a site of embodied, aesthetic confrontation with non-identity. The model is applied to Flight, the immersive installation in the Polish Pavilion at the ۲۰۱۹ Venice Biennale, revealing how such environments provoke critical identity reformation through disorientation, affect, and formal ambiguity. Findings demonstrate that immersive media can resist totalizing representations and catalyze reflexive self-understanding, validating the model’s applicability. This research contributes to media philosophy, aesthetic theory, and identity studies by offering a transferable framework for analyzing how media-art practices mediate, unsettle, and reconstruct identity in contemporary cultural life.

کلیدواژه ها:

Media Aesthetics ، Identity ، Adorno ، Negative Dialectics ، Immersive Art