Postmodernism

I would like to start off my blog by identifying all of the terms that were covered in the text. Postmodernity is, a term used to capture life during a period marked by radical transformation of social, economic, and political apects of modernity, marked by the flows of migration and global travel, the flow of information through the interent and new digital technologies, the dissolution of nation-states in their traditional sovereign from in the wake of the collapse of liberization, and the increased divide between rich and poor. It describes a set of social, cultural, and economic formations that have occured "post" or after the height of modernity and that have produced both a different window and different ways of being in the world than was the case of modernity. It has been referred to as a period of questioning of "metanarratives" by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard and of the premise that unified accounts and theories could adequately capture the human condition. It has also been descibed by Fredric Jameson as a historical period that is the cultural outcome of the "logic of late capitalism".

However postmoderism has been characterized as a critique of modernist concepts such as universalism, the idea of presence, the traditional notion of the subject as unified and self-aware, and faith in progress. Postmodernism is often understood as existing in the detritus of modernity. The concept is also used to describe particular styles in art, literature, architecture, and popular culture that engage in parody, bricolage, appropriation, and ironic reflexivity, as if there is nothing truly new to say, no ultimate knowledge to reveal. In terms of its application to art and visual stlye, postmodernism is a set of trends in the art world in the late twentieth century that question, among other things, concepts of authenticity, authorship, and the idea of style progression. Postmodern works are thus highly reflexive, with a mix of styles. In popular culture and advertising, the term postmodern has been used to descibe techniques that involve reflexivity, discontinuity, and pastiche and that speak to viewers as both jaded consumers and through self-knowing metacommunication.

Reflexivity is the practice of making viewers aware of the material and technical means of production by featuring those aspects as the "content" of a cultural production. reflexivity is both a part of the tradition of medernism, with its emphasis on form and structure, and of postmodernism, with its array of intertextual refrences and ironic marking of the frame of the image and its status as a cultural product. Reflexivity prevents viewers from being completely absorbed in the illusion of an experience of a film or image, distancing viewers from that experience.

Simulacara or simulation/simulacrum are terms famously used by Fench theorist Jean Baudrillard that refer to a sign that does not clearly have a real life counterpart, refrent, or precedent. A simulacrum is not necessarily a representation of something else, and it may actually precede the thing it simulates in the real world. Baudrillard stated that to simulate a disease was to acquire its symptoms, thus making it difficult to distinguish between the simulation and the actual disease. For example, a casino or amusement park simulacrum of the city of Paris can be seen as a substitute for the actual city and can perhaps for some viewers seem to offer a more compelling experience of Paris than the city itself, which may be totally out of reach for the viewer. An example of simulacra in my own personal life would have to be when I went to Disney world as a child. I went on a ride called Around the world. You sit in a row of seats, and it takes you threw a whole set up they have of all of the different contenants, and countries, and what those particualr countires have to offer. This was soemthing that I enjoyed very much. And because I will probabaly never get a chance to go to Disney world again or anytime soon, and will never actually see these pleaces on the ride, they portrayed those countires much better than I could have imagined. The rise seemed more appealing to me at the time, more than the places that it was replcating, proabaly because I was so young.

Some of the factors that characterize postmodernism identified throughout the reading that I found were, pastiche, parody, and the remake, reflexivity, the media, irony, collage, and eclecticism.

Lastly, postmodernisn is differnet from modernity because Postmodernism means, after the modernist movement, while modern refers to something related to the present. The movement of modernism and the reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives. It is used in critical theory to refer to a point of departure of works of literature, drama, architecture, cinema, journalism, and design, as well as in marketing and business as well as in the interpretation of history, law, culture, and relgion. Postomodernism is the cultural and intellectual phenomanam in the 20th and 21st century. Modernity stirctly refers to the time period and worldview begining approximately in the 18th century with the Enlightenment, reaching its height in the late 19th and 2oth centuries, when broad populations of Europe and North America were increasingly concentrated in urban centers and in industrial societies of increased mechanization and automation. Modernity is a time of dramatic technological change that embraces a linear view of progress as crucial to humankind's prosperity and an optimaistic view of the future at the same time that it embodieds an anxiety about change and social upheaval. It is charachterized by an embrace of technology and progress, a sense of revolutionary change, and anxities about its upheaval.

Consumerism

What is commodity fetishism?
The process through which commodities are emptied of the meaning of their production( the labor that produced them and the context in which they were produced) and filled instead with abstract meaning (usually through advertising). In Marxism, commodity fetishism is the process of mystification that exists in capitalism between what things are and how they appear. Commodity fetishism also describes the process by which special life powers are attributed to commodities rather than to other elements in social life. For example, to suppose that a brand of car confers self-worth is to engage in commodity fetishism. in commodity fetishism, exchange value has so superseded use value that things are valued not for what they do but for what they cost, how they look, and what connotations can be attatched to them. For instance, a commodity (such as bottled purified water) is emptied of the meaning of its production(where is was bottled, who worked to bottle it, how it is shipped) and filled with new meaning (mountain springs, purity) through advertising campaigns.
How do you think the relationships of consumers with branding had changed in the past couple of decades?
I think that the relationship of consumers with branding has changed dramatically over the past few decades. People are all buying into advertisers. I am pretty passionate about stuff like this. People are not grateful for what they have and it makes me sick. They would rather spend $1,000.00 on ONE pair of shoes, then pick up a pair that will work just as fine, for $20.00!I think that this is one of the many reasons why our economy is at a downfall. People are destroying this world. All of the money in the world, it doesn't even matter what country anymore is being wasted on getting these meatheads to see that they NEED this specific brand of shoe, them paying the obsene amount of moeny for it, and the richer are getting richer, as the poorer, poorer. Like stupid young 18 year old girls, they get their credit card offers, literally on there 18th birthday, because credit card companies know that they fall into the trap much quicker than men. Back in the day, people didn't have a problem with wearing a coat, just a simple coat, most were grateful that they could purchase one, after the great depression. Now all these fat little American kids get a new designer jacket, every season! This stuff really gets to me. There are starving people in the world, people being killed by their own government because they don't have the money to buy an airline ticket to get out of there, and here we are, wasting money on matierialistic, stupid things. And these peole don't even know what they are doing, this is life for them. Even when I was a kid, in the 80's toys lasted. My baby sister and god daughter are playing with toys that I did, 20 years ago! You buy them a new toy, made these days, and your lucky if it lasts til the next Christmas. Some times I am so ashamed to be living in the same world as these people. Anway, my answer to the question is that advertisers are certainly doing there job right, making consumers feel the need for a brand. And the world is getting sucked in.
What is metacommunication?How do advertisers use this to their advantage?
A discussion or exchange in which the topic is the exchange taking place itself. A "meta" level is a reflexivelevel of communicating. In popular culture, this refers to texts in which the topic is the viewer's act of viewing the text. An ad that addresses a viewer about the ways that the viewer is looking at the ad is engaging in metacommunication. Advertisers use this strategy by, getting consumers to see what the person that buys the advertised item looks like. An example would be some man looking at an ad for a Jeep Wrangler or something. The man in the ad that is looking at the automobile is an adventureous, rugged, tall, dark, and handsome kind of guy. But everybody knows that men who drive Jeep Wranglers are adventureous outdoorsy, kind of men. The man looking at the advertisement sees himself in the man, and wants to be more sdventurous, or manly, or whatever and then buys the Jeep to feel more like himself, or more like the man that he longs to be.

Consumer Culture

1) What is meant by consumer society and how is it related to the rise of medernity?
Cunsumer societies emerged in the context of modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the rise of mass production in the wake of the industiral revolutiion and with the consolidation of populations in major urban centers that took place in the 18th and 19th centuries throughout much of the industrial world. In a consumer society, the individual is confronted with and surrounded by a vast assortment of goods. The characteristics of these goods change constantly. In a consumer society there are great social and physical distances between manufacture of goods and their purchase and use. In a consumer society, there is a constant demand for new products. old products are sold with a new look, added features, a new design, or simply new slogans and ad campaigns. In a consumer society a large segmant of the population must be able to afford goods that are not absolutelt necessary to daily life but that they may want for an array of reasons, such as style or status. Consumer societies are integral to modernity. The mass production of marketing goods depended until the late 20th century on large sectors of the population living in concentrated areas, such as the distribution, purchase, and advertising of goods had an available audience. Yet it has also emerged simultaneously with the expansion of global chain stores, such as the Gap, Victorias Secret, Barnes and Nobles, and many others, as well as the success of big-box retailers and massive discount stores such as Costco and Wal-Mart. This means that we find many of the same stores in central shopping districts of cities around the world. It has been argued that in consumer societies people derive their sense of their place in the world and thei self-image at least in part through their purchase and use of commodities, which seem to give meaning to their lives in the absense of the meaning derived from the clse knit community.
2) How is capitalism related to commodity culture?
Commodities fit the bill as things to aid in self improvement and promising self-fulfillment. as the theraputic ethos that undergirds consumerism emerged in particular ways in North America and in parts of Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century as those societies embraced industrial capitalism and consumerism, it would also emerge in the context of other societies that did not have the same tradition of Protestantism. For instance, the emergence of consumerism in post war Japan was driven by the country's painful emergence from the devastation of WWII and the loss of its imperial monarchy. In China, consumerism, and along with it credit cards, emerged in the late 20th century hand in hand with a socialist system that maintains values of communal good not unlike those of Protestant affirmations of community. Many aspects of Chinese society embrace values of self-improvement and self-fulfillment through consumerism, even though those values of communism that ave structured Chinese society since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Consumerism has taken hold quite differently in different societies precisely because of the social values and economic and political systems under which they operate. Cultrual critic Walter Benjamin set out to describe the gilltering seductions of commodity capiltalism, he concentrated on one city, Paris, and its arcades.
3) How is visual pleasure related to the concept of the flaneur, how has mobility (associated with modernity) affected this concept?
Visual pleasure was an enormous part of the arcades attraction, it was a place to look at the spectacle of glass and metal structures, the packaging of goods, and fellow strollers, In the late 19th century, this kind of visual pleasure in the experience of shopping as entertainment was manifested in the rise of the department store. These enormous "palaces" to consumerism were built in major cities as destinations for citizen-consumers, from residents of the sity to vistitors from the countryside. The department store announced itself as a site of both commerce and leisure and was constructed in order to display the largest possible number of goods to a consumer, who was imagined as strolling through its isles. With enormous staircases, luxurious goods on sumptuous display, and elaborate decor, the department store intended to be awe inspiring. With the emergence of a consumer culture in the 19th century that depended on visual codes for pleasure, philospohers and writes described the figure of the flaneur, a man who strolls the streets of cities such as Paris, observing the urban landscape in a detached way while moving through it. The flaneur is a figure who moves through the city in an anonymous fashion and whose primary activity is looking. This visual culture of flanerie and window shopping in the 19th and early 20th centuries was related to the more mobile vision of modernity. In the 19th century flaneurs were men because respectable women were not allowed to stroll alone in the modern streets. As window shopping became an important activity, in particualr the rise of the department store, it allowed what Friedberg calls the flaneuse, a female window shopper, to emerge in more contemporary contexts. There are many kinds of gazes at play in the visual culture of modernity, from the cinematic predecessors such as the panorama to the cinematic gaze to the gazes at work in the urban environment of pedestrians, commerce, and mall display. Thus the new ways of looking in modern society were not limited to shopping but extended into all areas of urban life. These cultures of visuality and mobility continued to change throughout the 20th century. With the increased distances traveled by people in automobiles in the city and countryside in the early to mid 20th century, billboards becamse a central venue for advertising. Although advertising had been painted in large scale on city buildings for decades and billboards were a part of the urban landscape, the development of the automobile in the 1910's changed not only the landscape of communites and idustires but also the experience of consumerism. Billboards were designed to be seen on the go, and the automobile was increasingly seen as a consumer product connoting freedom and consumer mobility.
4) What is presumption of relevance?
In advertising the manner of speaking that makes the presumption that the issues presented are of utmost importance. in the abstract world of advertisements, for instance, the statment that having sjiny hair is the most important aspect of one's life does not register with viewers as absurd because of the presumption of this as relevant within the ad's message.
5) " Advertising asks us not to consume products but to consume signs in the sematic meaning of the term?" Explain.
Advertising sometimes sells belonging to a family, community, generation, nation, or specific group or class of people, attatching concepts of the nation, community, and democracy to products. Hence the ideological function of many advertisements takes the form of speaking a language of patriotism and nationalism in order to equate the act or purchasing a product with the practises of citizenship. in other words, ads that use an image of America or Britain or toehr nations to market products are selling the concept that in order to be a good citizen and to properly participate in the nation, one must be an active consumer. Many advertisements depict the family as a site of harmony, warmth, and security, an idealized unit with no problems that cannot be solved by commodities. Indeed, commodities are often presented as the means by which the family is held together, affirmed, and strengthened. Advertisements affirm this meaning that people relate to each other on the most intimate levels through consumerism, depicting commodities as facilitating familial emotion and communication (such as the giving of jewelry or flowers and other commodities to signal affection and value.).

Realism and Perspective

To start off my blog, I am going to answer the following assigned questions.
In what way can approaches to and appreciation of realism in art have political implications?
What constitutes realism in a given historical, geographic, or natural context can be a charged politcal issue. Realist approaches have often been put forward as a direct means of politcal expression, sometimes to challenge the status quo of realist representation. The question for us is not which approach to realism has resulted in the most accurate representations of the world at any given time, but what do the different approaches to realism that we find in art and visual culture tell us about the culture and polotics of a given social context.
What is the realism represented in cubism?
Cubists were interested in creating not fantasy worlds but new ways of looking at the real. John Berger has written, "Cubism changed the nature of the relationship between the painted image and reality, and by so doing it expressed a new realtionship between man and reality." According to cubists, cubism is a way of depicting the restless and complicated process of human vision.
What does avant-garde mean and what are some examples given in the reading?
Avant-garde is a term imported from military strategy(in which indicated an expedtionary or scouting force that takes risks)into art history to describe movements at the forefront of artistic experimentation, leading the way toward major changes. Avant-garde is often associated with modernism and formal innovation and is frequently contrasted with mainstream or traditional art that is conventional rather than challenging. Examples from the reading include, 4.21. Thise stlyes that seem in the context of European American art to be particularly modern and forward looking were influenced by art traditions that had much longer histories of abstraction and that also has had long histories of defying or simply not observing the conventional codes of perspective.
How does perspective fit into the episteme of the Renaissance?
Each period of histry has a different episteme, that is a different way of ordering things or of organizing and representing knowledge about things. Perspective is a techinque of visualization that was popularized in Italy in the mid 15th century that is embelmatic of the Renaissance interest in the fusion of art and science. To use perspective to create a painting a painter would use a geometric procedure to project space onto a two-dimensional plane.

Orientalism

After reading pages 11-129, I learned a few key terms when talking about and trying to understand Orientalism. First off, Orientalism is defined as a term popularized by cultural theroist Edward Said that refers to the ways that Western cultures concieve of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures as other and attribute to these cultures qualities such as exoticism and barbarism. Orientalism sees binary opposition between the West (the Occident) and the East (The Orient) in which either negative or romanticized qualities are attributed to the latter. For Said, Orientalism is a practice found in cultural representations, education, social science, and polotical policy. For instance, the stereotype of Arab people as fanatic terrorists is an example of Orietalism. Next I wanted to define the term binary opposition. In the book it is defined as the oppositions such as nature/culture, white/black, male/female, mind/body and so forth, through which reality has traditionally been represented. Although binary oppositions can seem immutable and mutually exclusive, contemporary theories of difference have demonstarated the ways in which these oppositional categories are interrelated and are ideologically and historically constructed. This leads to the exclusion of other positions in the spectrum between these binaries. For example, sexuality exists along a continuum and not soely in the form of two poles of identity, male and female. The historical reliance on binary oppositions points to the way that differences is essential to meaning and how we inderstand things.

However, binary oppositions are reductive ways of viewing the compexity of differnece, and as philosopher Jacques Derrida has argued, all binary oppositions are encoded with values and concepts of power, superiority, and worth.

The capacity of the photograph to establish both norms and otherness is highly evident in contemporary advertising, in which ads attach notions of exoticism to their products through images of places that are coded as distant and outside the world of consumptio the implied locale of the rice paddy and the use an Asian model give ordinary women's clothing a peasant quality. Here the hats worn typically by workers in rice paddies in order to shield their faces from the sun are recorded as signifiers of exoticism. We are not intended to think these women are actually performing the labor of working in the rice paddies . Rather the paddy offers an exotic location in which highly paid models and expensive clothing can be put on display.

In the Safari Ralph Lauren ad, the ad invites the consumer/viewer to assume the role of the liberated travler who moves through and unidentified exotic locale. The ad is arranged like a travelouge or scrapbook. The consumer is interpellated in these ads as a westerner who can buy an authentic exotic expierence. The consumer is also promised a virtually authentic experience as tourists in consuming the product.

One of the primary binary oppositions that is reiterated and debated in contemporary representation today is that the differences between Western and Eastern cultures. The difference formerly was captuered in the terms Occidental and Oriental, with Orientalism describing the tendencies of westterners who have fetishized, mythologicalized, and feared the culrues, land, and people of Asia and the Middle East. Photographs and other forms of representation are central elements in the production of Orientalism.

Cultural theorists Edward Said emphasized that the Orient is not strictly a place or culture in itself, but rather a European culture construction. Orientalism he expalined is about " the Orient's special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is alos the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of the deepest and most recurring images of the Other". Said argued that the concept of the Orient as other serves to establish Europe and the West as the norm.

Modernism

After reading pages 93-110,I can describe modernity as a term that scholars use to refer to the historical, culture, political, and economic conditions related to the Enlightenment (an eighteenth century philosophical movement)the rise of industrial society and scientific rationalism, and to the idea of controlling nature through technology, science, and rationalism. Modernity is associated with the belief that industrialization, human technological intervention in nature, mass democracy, and the introduction of a market economy are the hallmarks of social progress. The exact dates and conditions of modernity as a period are debated by historians. This is because not all countries became modern in this sense during the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries and because even those countries that did modernize in this way did not all embrace this same notion of the modern. Also not all countries embraced the same ideology of progress in the economy, thechnology, and military power. Whereas modernization was part of instituting a capitalist economy and a liberal democracy in the United States, for the Soviet union modernization in the form of industrialization and technological advacement was tied to Communist ethos of equal benefits and living conditions for all citizens . Imperial Europe played a role in instituting modernizing eneterprises in its colonies. The colonial strategies of modernization were justified by the Eurocentric belief that European practices and beliefs were objectively better than the cultural practices and ways of knowing and living in the world that had been in place prior to colonization.

The conditions of modernity were the grounds for the emergence of modernism. Modernism is a term that refers to a group of styles and movements in art, literature, architecture, and culture around the world dating from the 1800's through the mid to late 1900's. We use the term modern in an everyday sense to mean the present or recent times or to refer to contemporary views and fashions. In reltaion to art and culture, however the term modern takes on a differnt set of meanings .German scholar Jurgen Habermas explains that the concept of the modern has been used over and over again by socities since as long ago as the late fith century. In Haberma's terms the present culture sees itself as the product of a transition from old to new, modeling itself on a past era that is regarded as embodying timeless, classical principles. This all changed with the Enlightenment.

French philosopher Michel Foucault, in the twentieth century, argued that the human subject is constituted in modernity not through liberal human ideals but through the discourses of institutional life of the period. Foucault saw the subject as an entity produced within and through the discourses and institutional practices of the Enlightenment. Foucault's subject is never autonomous but is always constituted in relationships of power that are enacted through discourse.

The term discourse is defined as , in general the socially organized process of talking about a particular subject matter. More specifically, according to Michel Foucault , discourse is a body of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about something. Although there is no set list of discourses, the term tends to be used for broad bodies of social knowledge, such as the discourses of economics, the law, medicine, politics, sexuality, technology, and so forth. Discourses are specific to particular social and historical contexts, and they change over time. It is fundamental to Foucault's theory that discourses produce certain kinds of subjects and knowledge and that we occupy to varying degrees the subject positions defined within a broad array of discourses.

Decoders

After reading the assigned pages I learned a great deal about encoding and decoding. In the book it states that all images are encoded with meanings in their creation and production that is decoded by viewers. Then in states that Stuart Hall wrote an essay explaining the three positions viewers can take as decoders of cultural images and artifacts.

The first position that i learned about was the Dominant-hegemonic reading. They identify with the dominant message of an image or text, such as a television show, in an unquestioning manner. According to Hall few viewers actually occupy this position at any time because mass culture cannot satisfy all viewer's culturally specific experiences, memories, and desires because viewers are not passive recipients of the messgae of mass media and popular culture.

Next I learned that Negotiated Reading means that they can negotiate an interpretation from the image and its dominant meanings.According to Hall most readings are negotiated ones, in which viewers actively struggle with dominant meanings and modify them in numerous ways because of their own social status, beliefs, and values.

Lastly I learned that Oppositional reading means that they can take an oppositional position, either by completely disagreeing with the ideological position embodied in an image or rejecting it altogether.

When trying to figure out which decoder I would label myself as I decided that I am most simialr to the definition of a Negotiated reading. I can see some of the dominant readings, but I object others. I struggle with most dominant meanings and modify them because of my own social status, beliefs, and values. I chose this one because I can see what most people see, and I see why the would see things that way and decode things a certain way. I can also see what TV shows and such would want me to see. But untimatly I do have a very different set of values, and beliefs and they do influence the way that I would see things and decode them.