FAO: Phil... Postmodernism Essay Structure...

Here's my structure for the postmodernism essay with a bit about what i've included and written for each section. Are you able to clarify what i should add/change in my structure as suggested in your comment about my question?

Introduction:

In the introduction i've tried to explain, using appropriate quotes, that Postmodernism is a difficult topic and one that isn't necessarily understood or accepted. I've then written about what i aim to tackle in the essay, elaborating on the question.

What is Hyperreality?

In this section i've tried to use appropriate quotes and examples to help the reader understand what hyperreality is. In this case i've used Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco's example of Disneyland to put hyperreality into a real life context to help the reader understand what the essay is tackling.

Plato’s cave relation to The Matrix:

This section shows how we can draw the ideas of hyppereality back to the work of Plato/Socrates. Comparing the example that Plato uses in his book, The Republic, to the film in question, The Matrix. I have also used quotes from the film that i feel match what Plato is describing in his book, elaborating on the connection.

Jean Baudrillard References in The Matrix:

In this section i move onto breaking The Matrix down into the three orders of Simulacra by Baudrillard, suggesting an example from each order that i believe can be found in the film. I then moved onto Baudrillard's story of the people living in the map version of their own world, whilst the real world deteriorates as a comparison the the story of the Matrix, suggesting that it isn't too disimilar from Baudrillard's example, especially considering they even quote him in the film.

Disney’s Celebration Town in comparison to The Matrix:

This final section uses a real world example, Celebration Town, to pose help argue the point that we are in fact caught up in the simulacrum, living in a real life Matrix. In this particular example you can compare the corporates behind Disney to the agents in the film, keeping the inhabitants in order and control through a system which has been constructed by themselves.

Conclusion:

In my conclusion i summarise my research and conclude my side of the argument, again, posing the question, Are we victims of simulacrum, consumed by a real life Matrix? and asking the reader to really consider the question at hand based on the points shown.

Postmodernism Essay Question...

It's been through a couple of changes, but here is my question for the postmodernism essay so far. Don't worry, i'm well into the essay, it's just had slight changes as i've delved further into my topic.

So here it is:

Are we victims of simulacrum, consumed by a real life 'Matrix'?

New Postmodernism Essay Structure...

after realising that had too much to write about and finding that my word count is already higher than it should be, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, i've decided to remove a couple of things from my essay structure. I decided to remove the section about hyperreal food/tastes and also anything about Metaphysics as i don't feel that these are needed or add anything relevant to my essay. So here is the new and update version of my essay structure:

- INTRODUCTION (200 words)

- MAIN BODY (1600 words):

- WHAT IS MODERNISM?
- HOW DID MODERNISM INFLUENCE POSTMODERNISM?
- WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?
- WHAT IS HYPERREALITY?
- PLATO'S CAVE AND THE MATRIX.
- JEAN BAUDRILLARD IN THE MATRIX.
- CELEBRATION TOWN AND THE MATRIX.

- CONCLUSION (200 words)


I still feel like one or two things might be changed or removed before my hand-in because of my word count being quite high. But i'll have to see how things go...

The Matrix Essay Structure...

- Introduction (200 words stating what, why and how).

Write about the specific question.

- Essay Body (1600 words):

- What is Modernism? (Understanding Modernism)
- How did Modernism influence Postmodernism? (Understanding Modernism)
- What is Postmodernism? (Understanding Postmodernism)
- What are Hyperreality and Metaphysics? (Understanding Hyperreality and Metaphysics)
- Plato's Cave comparison to The Matrix (Ancient Philosophical reference)
- Jean Baudrillard in The Matrix (Theorist Reference)
- Disney's 'Celebration' Town comparison to The Matrix (Modern day reference)
- International Flavours and Fragrances comparison to The Matrix (Modern day reference)

- Conclusion (200 words):

Postmodernism Lecture 7 - Hyperreality...

Baudrillard claims that modern society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that the human experience is of a simulation of reality rather than reality itself.

Baudrillard suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more.

“…his postmodern universe is one of hyperreality in which entertainment, information, and communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life, as well as the codes and models that structure everyday life. The realm of the hyperreal (e.g., media simulations of reality, Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasylands, TV sports, and other excursions into ideal worlds) is more real than real, whereby the models, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior…

…In other words, an individual in a postmodern world becomes merely an entity influenced by media, technological experience, and the hyperreal…”

Hyperreality is ‘More real than real…’

THE MATRIX:

The character of Neo is woken up to the fact that the reality that he’s lliving in, is actually a construct. He’s living in a simulation. And then we find out that the real world is actually this dystopian nightmare.

The world that we take for granted is a copy; a simulation. Baudrillard is suggesting the world we live in is nothing more than an unreal world, that is interrogative which allows us to believe it is real.

THE TRUMAN SHOW:

It was about someone trying to get back to the truth; someone trying to break through the simulation; someone trying to actually get their head into the real world.

Postmodern minds try to get away from the constructed world to see it as it is.

DISNEYLAND, FLORIDA:

‘Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra. It is first of all a play of illusions and phantasms: the Pirates, the Frontier, the Future World… Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country… Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality… but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real…’

We know that Disneyland is artificial, it’s a big fantasy place full of European castles. But he argues that all of America is in fact an illusion; it’s all as constructed. It’s just that because Disneyland is clearly hyperreal, we look at Las Angeles and popular culture etc as being concrete and true. He’s arguing that everything is constructed, that everything has moved into a simulation.

Umberto Eco (1932-Present).

“… once the "total fake" is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real. So the Polynesian restaurant will have, in addition to a fairly authentic menu, Tahitian waitresses in costume, appropriate vegetation, rock walls with little cascades, and once you are inside nothing must lead you to suspect that outside there is anything but Polynesia… And if in the wax museums wax is not flesh, in Disneyland, when rocks are involved, they are rock, and water is water… When there is a fake hippopotamus, dinosaur, sea serpent it is not so much because it wouldn't be possible to have the real equivalent but because the public is meant to admire the perfection of the fake and its obedience to the program… A real crocodile can be found in the zoo, and as a rule it is dozing or hiding, but Disneyland tells us that faked nature corresponds much more to our daydream demands. When, in the space of twenty-four hours, you go… from the fake New Orleans of Disneyland to the real one, and from the wild river of Adventureland to a trip on the Mississippi, where the captain of the paddle-wheel steamer says it is possible to see alligators on the banks of the river, and then you don't see any, you risk feeling homesick for Disneyland, where the wild animals don't have to be coaxed. Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can…”

He is discussing how Disneyland makes the world even more vivid than the world is. The problem is that when we’ve been to Disneyland, and we’ve seen nature perfected; when we’ve seen environments at their most perfect, the world that we live in starts to feel less by comparison; the real world that surrounds us starts to feel disappointing, bland and banal.

‘The pleasure of imitation, as the ancients knew, is one of the most innate in the human spirit; but here we not only enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it…’

So this made up reality starts to feel superior and preferable to the world in which we actually live.

DISNEY’S ‘CELEBRATION’ TOWN, FLORIDA:

‘Just outside Disney World, in Florida, you will find the spankingly ever-sowired, futuristic new town of Celebration - the one satirized in the film Shrek. Celebration was the brainchild of Walt Disney himself. He wanted to create a town with a sense of community and cleanliness…

…one clue that there is something a little peculiar about Celebration is that it looks scarily like the suburb that imprisoned Jim Carrey in The Truman Show… Another is the constant hype that Celebration is ‘real’…
… But what really casts doubt on the reality of the place is the way it pretends to some kind of permanence. Most of the homes are designed in turn-of-the century
style, like almost every Disney film you’ve ever seen. The shops have signs with bogus foundation dates like ‘since 1905’ when actually everything is less than five years old. It is designed to give a timeless sense of what smalltown America used to be like - or should have been like… Muzak is piped from speakers built into the roots of the palm trees in the streets…

Disney’s brochures call it a ‘hopscotch-and-tag neighborhood to be viewed from a front porch swing’ and a ‘special place for families … in a time of innocence.’

‘…When some of the families involved decided to pack up and leave, Disney offered to waive the rule that they couldn’t profit from the sale if they left in less than a year - but only on condition they signed a contract promising never to reveal their reasons for wanting to go…

… There are whole phone directories full of rules for residents… These can’t be changed, even by the elected Homeowners’ Association, without the written approval of the company. All power remains behind the scenes with Disney for as long as they want it…’

So this is a real town for real people but actually the truth is that there are rules. To maintain that perfection, certain things have to be managed and taken care of.

POUNDBURY, DORSET:

‘When people today talk about the real thing… they often mean something old-fashioned. They mean ‘real’ linen sheets or ‘real’ country villages with thatched roofs, of ‘real’ meals of roast beef… The trouble with that kind of real is that it harks back to days where authenticity was bought, either at great expense, or by misusing
women or black people or poor people, to provide these so-called ‘real’ things…

There’s a worrying extreme conservatism that lurks behind this. There are those who believe that an ‘authentic’ English town means that only people of Anglo-Saxon descent live there…’

Where do we get the idea of what is real?

For some people real was actually about suppressing the rights of others. So that real was just a construct, it was just a set of ideas by someone else to present the world in a particular way.

Truth is the one thing that we cannot rely on anymore.

“We live, not inside reality, but inside our representations of it.”

“According to Baudrillard what has happened in postmodern culture is that our society has become so reliant on models and maps [images] that we have lost all contact with the real world that preceded the map.

In his essay, he uses as a metaphor, the story of people who build a full sized map of their world and then they decide not to live in the world, but to live in the map version of the world. And while they’re living in the map version of the world, the real world crumbles and deteriorates. So they move from the reality into the simulation. He uses this to suggest that, that is what we are doing all the time, we are moving away from what is real into existing in a simulation. His problem is that we no longer know the difference between the two things.

“Reality itself has begun merely to imitate the model, which now precedes and determines the real world… It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.

Baudrillard is not merely suggesting that postmodern culture is artificial, because the concept of artificiality still requires some sense of reality against which to recognize the artifice. His point… is that we have lost all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice.”

He [Baudrillard] argues that there are three "orders of simulacra":

1) in the first order of simulacra… the image is a clear counterfeit of the real;
the image is recognized as just an illusion, a place marker for the real.

2) in the second order of simulacra… the distinctions between the image and the representation begin to break down because of mass production and the proliferation of copies. Such production misrepresents and masks an underlying reality by imitating it so well, thus threatening to replace it. However, there is still a belief that, through critique or effective political action, one can still access the hidden fact of the real.

3) in the third order of simulacra, which is associated with the postmodern age, we are confronted with a precession of simulacra; that is, the representation precedes and determines the real. There is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation; there is only the simulacrum.

We now think this simulation is the world, and real.

INTERNATIONAL FLAVOURS AND FRAGRANCES INC:

It’s there job to ensure the food we eat tastes like we expect it to. They give us the flavours and smells that we associate with real things.

Based on their based about savoury:

“Succulent beef, delicate chicken, and tangy cheese lead the way for IFF’s family of savoury flavour profiles… Whatever your product segment, IFF’s outstanding savoury meat, tomato, dairy, seafood, and vegetable flavours deliver the true taste, aroma, and mouthfeel for every consumer preference.”

Notice the use of the word true in ‘true taste’. This isn’t a company dealing with the reality of food, this isn’t someone giving us a steak, it’s someone giving us a hyper experience of steak; what we would imagine steak to taste like. Recall the scene in The Matrix where they can’t choose between porridge or a fake steak. The idea is, is it a steak if it tastes like a steak.

Plato's Cave...

Inside the cave

Socrates begins by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon to imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads "including figures of men and animals made of wood, stone and other materials". The prisoners watch the shadows cast by the men, not knowing they are shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.

Socrates suggests the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen or heard. They would praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world, and the whole of their society would depend on the shadows on the wall.

Release from the cave

Socrates next introduces something new to this scenario. Suppose that a prisoner is freed and permitted to stand up. If someone were to show him the things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize them for what they were and could not name them; he would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he sees.

"Suppose further," Socrates says, "that the man was compelled to look at the fire: wouldn't he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn't the man be angry at the one doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn't he be distressed and unable to see "even one of the things now said to be true," viz. the shadows on the wall?

After some time on the surface, however, Socrates suggests that the freed prisoner would acclimate. He would see more and more things around him, until he could look upon the Sun. He would understand that the Sun is the "source of the seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions had been seeing".

Return to the cave

Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. "Wouldn't he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn't he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn't he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? "Wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn't they kill him?"

Remarks on the allegory

Socrates remarks that this allegory can be taken with what was said before, viz. the metaphor of the Sun, and the divided line. In particular, he likens

"the region revealed through sight" – the ordinary objects we see around us – "to the prison home, and the light of the fire in it to the power of the Sun. And in applying the going up and the seeing of what's above to the soul's journey to the intelligible place, you not mistake my expectation, since you desire to hear it. A god doubtless knows if it happens to be true. At all events, this is the way the phenomena look to me: in the region of the knowable the last thing to be seen, and that with considerable effort, is the idea of good; but once seen, it must be concluded that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful – in the visible realm it gives birth to light and its sovereign; in the intelligible realm, itself sovereign, it provided truth and intelligence – and that the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it".

After "returning from divine contemplations to human evils", a man "is graceless and looks quite ridiculous when – with his sight still dim and before he has gotten sufficiently accustomed to the surrounding darkness – he is compelled in courtrooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice or the representations of which they are the shadows, and to dispute about the way these things are understood by men who have never seen justice itself?"

The Matrix - Postmodernism Quotes... 'The Truth', Reality, Dream worlds and Hyperreality...

Computer: "Wake up, Neo."


Neo: “You ever had that feeling where you’re not sure if you’re awake or still dreaming.”


Neo’s Boss: “Do you have a problem with authority Mr. Anderson?
You believe that you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously you are mistaken… This company is one of the top software companies in the world because every single employee understands that they are part of a whole. Thus if an employee has a problem, the company has a problem… The time has come to make a choice, either you choose to be at your desk on time, or you chose to find yourself another job.”


Agent: “What good is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?”


Morpheus: “Do you believe in fate Neo?”
Neo: “No.”
Morpheus: “Why not?”
Neo: “Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.”


Morpheus: “The Matrix is everywhere, it is all around us. Even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you got to work; when you go to church; when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
Neo: “What truth?”
Morpheus: “That you are a slave Neo, like everyone else your were born into bondage; born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch, a prison for your mind.”


Morpheus: “Remember, all I’m offering is the truth and nothing more.”


Cypher: “Buckle your seat belt Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye, bye.”
(Alice in Wonderland references are also used.)


Morpheus: “Have ever had a dream that you was so sure was real; what if you were unable to wake from that dream. How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?”


Neo: “Why do my eyes hurt?”
Morpheus: “Because you’ve never used them before.”


Morpheus: “Rest Neo, the answers are coming.”

Neo: “Right now we’re inside a computer program?”
Morpheus: “Is it really so hard to believe?
Your clothes are different, the plugs in your arms and head are gone, your hair has changed. Your appearance now is what we call residual self image; it is the mental projection of your digital self.”


Neo: “This isn’t real?”
Morpheus: “What is real? How do you define real?
If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste, and see; then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”


Morpheus: “This is the world that you know; the world as it was at the end of the 20th century. It exists now only as a neural interactive simulation, that we call the Matrix. You’ve been living in a dream world Neo.”


Morpheus: “Welcome to the desert of the real”


Morpheus: “…At some point, in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to artificial intelligence.”


Morpheus: “… human beings are no longer born, we are grown.”


Morpheus: “What is the Matrix?
Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this [a battery].”


Morpheus: “I didn’t say it would be easy Neo, I just said it would be the truth.”


Morpheus: “I feel I owe you an apology. We have rule, we never free a mind once it’s reached a certain age. It’s dangerous; the mind has trouble letting go.”


Morpheus: “When the Matrix was first built, there was a man born inside, who had the ability to change whatever he wanted; to remake the Matrix as he saw fit. It was he who freed the first of us; taught us the truth. As long as the Matrix exists, the human race will never be free.”


Morpheus: “I’m trying to free your mind Neo, but I can only show you the door; you’re the one who has to walk through it.”


Neo: “I thought it wasn’t real?”
Morpheus: “Your mind makes it real.”


Morpheus: “The Matrix is a system Neo, that system is our enemy. When you’re inside you look around and what do you see?
Business men, teachers, lawyers, carpenters; the very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy… Many of them are… so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it… If you are not one of us, you are one of them.”


Morpheus: “I’ve seen an agent punched through a concrete wall; men have emptied entire clips at them and hit nothing but air. Yet their strength and their speed is based in a world that is based on rules…”


Cypher: “I know this steak doesn’t exist; I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, do you know what I realised?
Ignorance is bliss.”


Mouse: “If you close your eyes it almost feels like you’re eating runny eggs… Do you know what it really reminds me of?
Tasty Wheat. Did you ever eat Tasty Wheat?”
Switch: “No. But technically neither did you.”
Mouse: “That’s exactly my point… because you have to wonder, how do the machines really know what Tasty Wheat tasted like?
Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like, was oatmeal or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken for example, maybe they couldn’t figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything.”

Kid: “Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realise the truth.”
Neo: “What truth?”
Kid: “There is no spoon… then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

Cypher: “If you’d have told us the truth, we would have told you to shove that red pill up your arse.”
Trinity: “That is not true Cypher, he set us free.”
Cypher: “You call this free. All I do is what he tells me to do. If I have to choose between that and the Matrix; then I choose the Matrix.”
Trinity: “The Matrix isn’t real.”
Cypher: “I disagree Trinity. I think the Matrix can be more real than this world… Welcome to the real world.”

Agent: “… Some believe that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilisation. I say ‘your civilisation’ because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilisation.”

Agent: “Human beings are a plague. You are a disease and we are the cure.”

Neo: “… I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible…”

Baudrillard and Kant in The Matrix...

It seems that Baudrillard's theories can be compared to the ideas and theories that Kant has talked about, in which the world is in fact comparable to The Matrix.

Greek Philosophy Meets Post Modernism in The Matrix...

Here's a really helpful video about understanding how postmodernism has been integrated in The Matrix and how this can relate to the philosophical ideologies of Socrates and Platos. In particular it talks about Platos Allegory of the Cave, which is something i will do some further research into.

Postmodernism Essay Topic: The Matrix...

The Matrix is full of references to Baudrillard's Postmodern theory throughout the trilogy and follows the ideas and concept of hyperreality, a very Postmodern subject. Using The Matrix, in the context of Postmodernism, I will be able to show a specific type of Postmodern theory as an aid for further developing an understanding for the reader. I will use labels to keep all my research together, this research can be found under the section of Postmodernism.

Postmodernism Lecture Week 3...

- Scream (and Scream again) the avant-garde is dead.
- "The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism." (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avant-garde).
- With postmodernism the avant-garde is a notion that has been thrown out and dis-proved.
- Avant garde is the French word for vanguard. A group or work that is innovative or inventive on one or more levels: subject, medium, technique, style, or relationship to context. An avant-garde work pushes the known boundaries of acceptable art sometimes with revolutionary, cultural, or political implications.
- 'We artists will serve you as an avant-garde... the power of the arts is most immediate: when we want to spread new ideas we inscribe them on marble or canvas. What a magnificent destiny for the arts is that of exercising a positive power over society, a true priestly function and of marching in the van [ie vanguard] of all the intellectual faculties! (Henri de Saint-Simon, 1825).
- Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1895.
- Kasimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918.
- "It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at "abstract" or "non-objective" art... The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape - not its picture - is aesthetically valid; something given, increate [existing without having been created], independent of meanings, similars or originals..." (Clement Greenberg, Avant-garde and Kitsch, 1939).
- What we arrive at is 'art for art's sake'.
- Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917.
- You could argue that postmodernity in the arts kind of begins here with the Fountain.
- Marcel Duchamp, LHOOQ, 1919.
- Pastiche is a cultural artefact composed from elements appropriated from other works; the term can be used in a derogatory sense to indicate lack of originality, or to refer to works that involve a deliberate and playfully imitative tribute. The frequent resort to pastiche is a characteristic feature of postmodernism.
- Appropriation is the direct duplication, copying or incorporation of an image/object from an identified source by an artist who represents it in a different context, thus altering its meaning and questioning notions of originality and authenticity.
- Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup Can, 1964.
- Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986.
- Irony is the use of words/images to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning... An expression, utterance or undertaking marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning... A literary or artistic style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect... Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs...
- Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988.
- '... the effacement of some key boundaries or seperations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture. This is perhaps the most distressing development of all from an academic standpoint, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture... and in transmitting difficult and complex skills of reading, listening and seeing to its initiates...' (Frederic Jameson, The Cultural Turn, 1999).
- Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 1989.
- Sherrie Levine, Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp: A.P.), 1991.
- "I try to make art which celebrates doubt and uncertainty. Which provokes answers but doesn't give them. Which withholds absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. Which suspends meaning while perpetually dispatching you toward interpretation, urging you beyong dogmatism, beyond doctrine, beyond ideology, beyond authority." (Sherrie Levine).
- Golf GTI, 'Singing in the Rain Remix', 2005.
- 'Culture beginning to cannibalise itself.'
- '... In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum... this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and aesthetic, the failure of the new, the inprisonment of the past...' (Frederic Jameson, The Cultural Turn, Verso, 1999).
- 'The Nostalgia Mode' (La Mode Retro).
- Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho shower scene.
- Halloween followed a successful formula, as did Friday the 13th.
- "What's the point? They're all the same, some stupid killer stalking some big breasted girl who can't act who's always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door. It's insulting." (Sidney Prescott, Scream).
- "A psycho killer obsessed with horror movies terrorizes a high schooler (Neve Campbell), whose mother was brutally murdered exactly one year earlier. Sounds like a typical, predictable, slasher film, and to a certain extent, horror maven Wes Craven's latest is. But, ironically, the predictability is actually one of the film's virtues. Scream, written with much self-mocking wit by Kevin Williamson, is also a satire of the "scary movie" genre, knowingly highlighting and celebrating its formula trappings while poking fun at them..." (mrbrownmovies.com/moviept15.html#scream).
- "The slasher genre was long dead before this came along. Since the days of Halloween and Friday the 13th the genre had drowned itself with a cascade of rip-offs, clones and semi-spoofs. But along came Wes Craven and conjured up Scream, a self-aware film which tried to break free of the old slasher mould by offering us something very different. And it works to almost perfection. There is no question that the film isn't cliched itself. Practically everything had been done before. There's the girl who goes outside to investigate a noise, the teenager alone in the house, the killer who wears a mask, etc. But because the characters in the film know this as well, the film is turned right around into something very fresh and innovative." (www.popcornpictures.co.uk/sfilms/scream.shtml).
- "There is, perhaps, a degree of consensus that the typical post-modernist artefact is playful, self-ironizing and even schizoid; and that it reacts to the austere autonomy of high modernism by impudently embracing the language of commerce and commodity. It's stance towards cultural tradition is one of irreverent pastiche, and its contrived depthlessness undermines all metaphysical solemnities..." (Terry Eagleton, 1987).

Postmodernism Lecture 2 Notes...

Introducing Postmodernism or 'The Apple, Auschwitz and The Incredulous Frenchman'...

- Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that the postmodern age is characterised by an 'incredulity towards meta-narratives.' (The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge, 1979).
- Incredulous is to not believe in something.
- Meta-narratives are large-scale theories and philosophies of the world.
- Examples of meta-narratives include religion, science, history and art.
- Meta-narratives are Teleological.
- Teleology supposes that there is inherent purpose or a directive principle at work in nature; put simply, it describes the inevitable 'coming-to-be' of something - the guarantee of progression towards a higher, greater level of development or definitive form.
- Religion is teleological because of its emphasis on transcendence.
- Art is teleological because of its perceived evolution from art movement to art movement and associated notion of the 'avant-garde'.
- Science is teleological because scientific discoveries are seen as unlocking the secrets of existence and revealing it finally.
- History is teleological because of the perceived progression from epoch to epoch, with each age more advanced than its predecessor.
- Meta-narratives are Utopian.
- Utopia is an ideally perfect place, especially in its social, political, and moral apects. In other words, they all lived happily ever after.
- Meta-narratives are Essentialist.
- Essentialism is the practice of regarding something as having innate existence or universal validity.
- Meta-narratives are Modern.
- "Modernism is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology, and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic." (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism).
- "Simply put, the overarching goal of Modernism... has been the creation of a better society." (Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, Roots of Modernism, witcombe.sbc.edu/modernism/roots.html).

All the planets and other objects in the universe move according to gravity; this mutual attraction explains the orderly and mechanistic motions of the universe.


The Universe can be explained completely through the use of mathematics; mathematical models of the universe are accurate physical descriptions of the universe.


The universe operates in a rational and predictable way following the mathematics used to describe the universe; the universe is mechanistic.



One need not appeal to religion or theology to explain any aspect of the physical phenomena of the universe.

- "If the universe was a vast machine of interacting objects, that meant that it could be understood as a machine. Human reason and the simple observation of the phenomena were sufficient to explain the universe; if physical phenomena were mechanistic, that means that physical phenomena can be manipulated, that is engineered... If the universe was a machine and could be understood rationally, then so perhaps could economics, history, politics, and ethics. It also followed that if economics, history, politics, and ethics were mechanical, they could be explained without recourse to religion or God and they could be manipulated as if they were machines, that is, they could be improved, engineered, and made to run better." (Richard Hooker, The European Enlightenment - The Scientific Revolution, www.wsu.edu/~dee/ENLIGHT).
- 'The Enlightenment Project' (1668-1789).
- "Eighteenth century science saw an explosion of empirical knowledge about the physical world. A virtual flood of empirical observations and calculations inspired not only an increase in knowledge, but a massive effort to systematize that knowledge as Newton had done. The scientific revolution of the eighteenth century is, above everything else, characterized by fanatical conversion of knowledge into rational systems." (Richard Hooker, The European Enlightenment - The Scientific Revolution, www.wsu.edu/~dee/ENLIGHT).
- Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801).
- Physiognomy is when you categorise people's personalities by reading their facial features. (refer to physiognomy pictures).
- Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914).
- Categorising criminality through the human face.
- "Every measurement slowly reveals the workings of the criminal. Careful observation and patience will reveal the truth." (Alphonse Bertillon).
- "The morally best, the most beautiful. The morally worst, the most deformed." (Johann Kaspar Lavater).
- "I hence conclude that the improvement of the breed of mankind is no insuperable difficulty. If everybody were to agree on the improvement of the race of man being a matter of the very utmost importance, and if the theory of the hereditary transmission of qualities in men was as thoroughly understood as it is in the case of our domestic animals, I see no absurdity in supposing that, in some way or other, the improvement would be carried into effect." (Francis Galton, Memories of My Life, 1908).
- 'The Final Solution' (Adolf Hitler).
- Hitler was all about a better society, but only accoring to his own ideas.
- Meta-narratives are teleological?
- Largely it isn't.
- Meta-narratives are utopian?
- There aren't huge amounts of evidence that we're moving towards utopian existence.
- Meta-narratives are essentialist?
- Culturally we are at greater fragmentation right now.
- "The Enlightenment project... took it as axiomatic (self-evident) that there was only one possible answer to any question; from this it followed that the world could be controlled and rationally ordered if we could only picture and represent it rightly; this presumed there existed a single correct mode of representation which, if we could uncover it (and this is what the scientific and mathematical endeavours were all about), would provide the means to Enlightenment ends." (David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity).
- "The postmodern is deliberately elusive as a concept, avoiding as much as possible the modernist desire to classify and thereby delimit, bound, and confine. Postmodernism partakes of uncertainty, insecurity, doubt, and accepts ambiguity. Whereas Modernism seeks closure in form and is concerned with conclusions, postmodernism is open, unbounded, and concerned with process and 'becoming'." (Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, Roots of Modernism).

Postmodernism Lecture One...

- Postmodernism is difficult because, "The concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even understood..." (Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn).
- "'Postmodern' has become one of the most used, and abused, words in the language. Yet few people can say with any assurance what the term actually means or involves..." (Stuart Sim, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism).
- Key words: Skepticism and Relativism.
- Relativism = Your truth and my truth have equal bearing. The way you see things and the way I see things are relative, there isn't one single truth that could be said to be the truth for everybody. (Refer to the cartoon in slides).
- Key words: High Modernism, Capitalist, Superabundance, Disconnected, Pop, Fragmentary, Eclectic Nostalgia, Simulacra, Superficiality, Flippant, Depthless, Fabulation, Pastiche, Bricolage, Aleatory.
- "... references to postmodernism crop up in a comic way in lager commercials [or] in a spoof of 'arty types'... An article in a British journal devoted to horror films recently described 'slasher movies' as the postmodern phenomenon... pretentiousness is held to typify those who even use the word..." (Glenn Ward, Postmodernism).
- "postmodernity is modernity without the hopes and dreams which made modernity bearable. It is a hydra-headed, decentred condition in which we get dragged along from pillow to post across a succession of reflecting surfaces..." (Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light) = a metaphor for postmodernity.
- The volume, Postmodernism for Beginners, uses another name for this same environment whn it suggests that its illustrated pages might constitute the "crucial guide for anyone fascinated or exasperated by the hall of mirrors that is postmodernism." (Richard Appiganesi, Chris Garret, Postmodernism for Beginners) = another metheaphor for postmodernity.
- Postmodernism is apocalyptic.
- Postmodernism is schizoid.
- Postmodernism is power.
- Postmodernism is revolutionary.
- Postmodernism is 'political correctness gone mad'.
- Postmodernism is self-obsessed.
- Postmodernism is a 'sell-out'.
- Postmodernism is blasphemous.
- Postmodernism is dangerous.
- Postmodernism is creative.
- Postmodernism is unimaginative.
- Postmodernism is bullshit.
- "The Sokal Hoax" shows the concept that postmodernism is bullshit.
- Postmodernism is everywhere.
- Postmodern Examples: Madonna, Lady Gaga, Bluewater, The Simpsons, Banksy, YouTube, Shrek, Family Guy: Blue Harvest, Scream, Cadbury Gorilla Advert, Disneyland, Snakes on a Plane and Wikipedia.
- "No one exactly agrees as to what is meant by the term, except, perhaps, that 'postmodernism' represents some kind of reaction to, or departure from, 'modernism'. Since the meaning of modernism is also very confused, the reaction or departure known as 'postmodernism' is doubly so..." (David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity).
- Modernism is difficult.
- Modernism is the deliberate departure from tradition and the use of innovative forms of expression that distinguish many styles in the arts and literature of the 20th century.
- "To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world... Modernity can be said to unite all mankind..." (Marshall Berman, All that is solid melts into air, 1982).
- "But it is a paradoxical unity - a unity of disunity; it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish..." (Marshall Berman, All that is solid melts into air, 1982).
- How can modernism and postmodernism be all these things?
- "Where a modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world... the postmodernist greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference..." (www.answers.com/topic/postmodernism).
- Postmodernism is important.
- "There is no such thing as a definition of the postmodern... Postmodernism, with all its complexity and possible excesses, is an attempt to find new and more truthful versions of the world." (www.essortment.com/all/postmodernphilo_rorp.html).