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1. Does "identification" mean "giving identity to someone or something"?

2. What do yellow "register"'s mean?

3. Do the blue-color "oneself", "her", and "she"'s all refer to a female visitor of Kelly's installation?

Context:

Rather than soldering oneself to the commoditised pleasures of narcissistic identification, Kelly proffers the possibility that female pleasure might be gleaned from the process of shifting between different registers of symbolisation, recognising that none of them sum up or epitomise the woman, but that her subjectivity is found in the partial identifications she makes as she circumnavigates these registers in the space of the installation. According to art historian Norman Bryson, Interim offers us criss-crossings of the different registers of the sign – icon, symbol, index – in order to avoid the stasis of the narcissistic mode of identification that tends to bolster up our fantasies of wholeness and completeness.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

catttt1. Does "identification" mean "giving identity to someone or something"?

I don't think so. I think it refers to the process of identifying with another person or a fictional character. For example, when I read Moby ****, I identify with Ahab, it feels like it's me doing what he does. Others might identify with the narrator or Queequeg, or even the whale.

catttt2. What do yellow "register"'s mean?

I guess it's a variation on a conventional meaning, " A variety or level of language used in a specific social setting: speaking in an informal register; writing in a scientific register." (AHD https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=register ) n.9. It is jargon. Amother writer might say "level".

catttt3. Do the blue-color "oneself", "her", and "she"'s all refer to a female visitor of Kelly's installation?

It seems like it, but this is bad. The writer probably changed "herself" to "oneself" in editing because she saw that "herself" had to mean "Kelly", which is not what she intended, but she did not notice the problem that created with the other pronouns, and she did not notice that it didn't really fix the original problem This is why everybody needs an editor who is not himself. There is an old saying, "A doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient."

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