Postmodernism Lecture Notes week 9

Taming the Hydra

• concept of post modernism is not widely accepted or understood
• post modernism is a disputed term
• dealing with why it is disputed term
• dealing with it on a philosophical level - address the debate
• Focus on 'one head of the hydra'
• modernism is a trend thought affirming the power of human beings to create, improve and reshape their environment
• need to deal with the 'modernism' to fully understand postmodernism
• modernity begins with enlightenment project - possible beginning
•  the thrust to find something final - the avant garde
• real world that is fixed and we can get to
• postmodernism seeks uncertainty, insecurity and doubt - open and unbound, corcerned with process of becoming
• try and find transparent structure but end up with our own interpretation and self
• introduce one of the people in the ideas e.g death of the author - Roland Barthes
• Jean -Francois Lyotard - Meta narratives
• Derrida - Deconstruction 'attack on tradition'
• Jean Baudrillard - Hyper realism
• Barthes believes what we think it means what does the cultural reference mean to us
• 'Your world is constructed' - All text is quotations = common conclusion to all key ideas

• All products are ideas taken from someone else
• Lyotard - non linear, relative, plural
• project of modernism went wrong - e.g. the holocaust, one definitive view on jews and gas chambers
• failure of 'utopia' = Anti Enlightenment
• Derrida attacks the structure of world through language - binary oppositions made cultural shows how created and structured and flexible they are
• unreliable - in order to take a view, one has to disregard all others
• Mise en abyme, a undecided cultural argument with no outcome
• Baudrillard - reality created for us by media, advertising, consummers, etc
• we are already living in the matrix, our world shaped by ideas given to us
• truth is always relative to differing stand points
• "we live, not inside reality, but inside our representation of it"
• People's view and over arching goal creates a problem and asks 'who is the creator' 'who is telling you to live in their world'
• e.g. M+S - hyper real food advertising
• e.g. Neo becoming the one in The Matrix, he finally sees the code of that reality, deconstructs that world so he can make a choice of decisions he makes
• once we reach enlightenment, human identity, social systems and the world are constructed from code
• Dancer in the Dark - musical most structured genre - America - about the limits of genre deconstructs 'the musical' - self conciously questions itself