Post Modernism week 3 - Lecture Notes

Introducing Post Modernism or The Apple, Auschwitz and The Incredulous Frenchman

• Francis Galton - Four component faces
• Auschwitz - corpses - world went mad and let it happen
• set of images of that are the same but produced differently
• meta - narratives = large scale philosophies of the world
• Teleological - inherent purpose, direct principle at work in nature - 'coming to be' of something
• Utopian - perfect place in social, political and moral aspects
• Essentialist - regarding something universal
• Modern - affirms humans to create, improve and reshape environment
• Goal of creation of Modern society
• Incredulous - disbelieving
• Sir Issac Newton - deprives a 'principle of gravity'
• Universe is mechanistic - opens the door of controlling what's around us
• Universe as a vast machine of interacting objects
• 'The Enlightenment Project' cutting through darkness to knowledge
• Fanatical conversion of knowledge into rational systems
• Lavatar believed dis juice machine running human soul read from physical head shape/ profile
• Attempt to look at soul, windows of person's character
• 'The muscle of Fright and Terror - looking at exterior at engine driving the muscles
• Bertillion poster of physical features - variety but trying to find what is the same
• careful observation and patience arrives at the truth
• The Morally Best, the Most Beautiful, The Morally Worst, The Most Deformed

• 'Facial Angles' - Appear to be true genuine profile of two models of society, divide and draw conditions
• Indigenous faces of the Earth - Hierarchy of the perfect all the way down to primitive
• Apollo Belvedere - hyper real depiction of the male form
• Eugenics - study of attempting to improve human race by selecting breeding - remove bad genes
• Modernist views - position and view of who's making decisions - Hitler returning German race as pure 'The Final Solution'
• Ideology - Truth of the same idea
• Science, economics and history has a guaranteed cycle of improvement that will be fixed but according to selected people
• Essentialism - innate existence or universal vadility
• A single correct mode of representation - what postmodernity fears
• Thomas Ruff, other potrait - reminds of passport photo - document but nobody - made of different male and female features digitally - a question mark and undecideable
• Post Modern is elusive as a concept
• One profile trying to find an answer and truth Ruffs profile doesn't care, it was meant to be a question

• Mulholland Drive - detective Film Noir - trying to find the truth to a question