Wednesday 28 September 2011

Postmodernism Week 2 - Lecture notes

Reflections on Transparency

Modernism - Transparency
Post Modernity - Mirror, seeing self reflected
  • Recurrent metaphor - mirrors/ reflection
  • Mise en abyme - infinity
  • Return to 'The Enlightenment Project' thinkers moved away from Paradymn/ view of world to explore other options - scientist in god - like place
  • Age of Classification - Trying to arrive at Truth
  • Micro grapha - Robert Hooke - series of drawings of body through manifying glass - come up with cell
  • Utopian material was sheet glass - Robert Hughes 'Shock of the New'
  • Le Corbusier - transparent building, opening it up to light
  • surface is covered in ornament - point of throwing ornament away to get to structure
  • 'The International style' - ornament is crime, form follows function, machines for living, truth to materials'
  • Utopian - agreement to live similarly - final - fixed way to live - one size fits all
  • Structuralism - not architecture - method vs enquiry which preceeds from premise cultural activity as a science
  • Ferdinand de Saussure
  • Concept - signified  
  • Sound-image - signifer
  • Zebra - image, word, sound - need the concept/ idea first to agree culturally
  • Accuring formilliarity to terms agreed - confluent
  • Parole - individual speech practice
  • Langue - a communal route - system or structure
  • Variety within language - cut through to more structural
  • Ultimate structure - existed in our brains proir to history
  • Claude Levi Strauss - anthropologist - what was link between the stories, rituals
  • "myths are versions of basic themes"
  • Looking at all things that one subject is not common element of all cultures - structure embedded within our brain all along
  • binary oppositions - universal structures - constrast between two exclusive terms - distinctions as fundamental to all language and thought
Post Structualism

  •  Post Modernism comes from a lot of it's theories
  • Theory + structuralism = one size fits all ?
  • Meaning isn't out there or transparent
  • Jacques Derrida - Theory of Deconstruction - Mentioned in a later lecture
  • Structuralism can been seen to impose it's own reading upon a text - objectivity up for question
  • Trapped looking at ourselves, imposing our own meaning
  • Levi Strauss offering an escape but just just follows his particular views - superior knowledge, wisdom
  • Preparing views of own experiences not objectivity
  • Through The Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
  • Alice and Humpty - master of the meaning - power - authority - excludes all other views - can only mirror
  • Theory of nothing can go faster than light but today proved it might be possible




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