Surface and style over substance: If it the priority is play, then the emphasis is on the surface, in other words, if the main focus is the idea of just connecting one product to another, then the focus is superficial, shallow, lacking depth, so ‘in a postmodern world, surfaces and style become the most important defining features of the mass media and popular culture

In terms of the key principles of art and design the priority is informal elements: of shape, colour, texture, movement, space, time and so on. As opposed to more discursive principles of narrative, character, motivation, theme, ideology. Or put simply: STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE.

For example, The Art of Noise was a group of white experimental musicians from the 1980s who presented themselves through abstract, impressionistic videos. The focus is therefore on image, surface, style. Meaning and interpretation are obtuse, disguised, removed and difficult to apprehend. No surprise then that this group of middle-aged white art-school musicians ‘were voted the second-best new black act’ because ‘they think we’re black‘ 

we live in a fake news society as we become more fragmented, anxious and vulnerable as a society

In 1959, Richard Hoggart (Uses of Literacy) noted the shift in modern societies particularly the impact on our ‘ neighbourhood lives’, which was ‘an extremely local life, in which everything is remarkably near‘ (1959:46). As John Urry comments, this was ‘life centred upon groups of known streets’ where there was ‘relatively little separation of production and consumption‘ (2014:76). Urry goes on to note that ‘because the global population grew during the twentieth century from 2 to 6 billion. Cities, towns, villages and houses all became high-consuming energy centres’ (97). Thus, a characteristic of modern (postmodern?) societies, is the creation, development and concentration of centres of high consumption, with a displacement of both consumption and production that has radically altered the nature of societies and individuals living in them.

 expression of a new phase of capitalism, one which was aggressively consumerist, rampantly commodifying all of society as potential new markets. For many, this is reflective of the new global economy (globalisation), which has created a high polarized class division between the rich / the real super-rich and the poor / underclass (ie the really, really poor) made possible through the rapid increase of new forms of technological developments. For instance, it may be possible to identify the extent to which our economic experience is now characterised by what we buy (consumption) than what we make (production).

There is an argument that postmodern culture is a consumer culture, where the emphasis on style eclipses the emphasis on utility or need. So that ultimately there is no real value to a postmodern culture other than the need for consumption. If this is the case, then it is possible to link postmodernist cultural expression with broader shifts in society, specifically around economics and politics.

 new communications technologies, such as mobile telephony, which has created new (digital) worlds connected across time and space in ways which were completely unimaginable to previous generations. Often these are acts of individualised and personal consumption, where we are more likely to consume what we want when we want, where we want and how we want.

“consumption by its very nature bolsters a self-centred individualism which is the basis for stable and secure identities

Fragmentary consumption = Fragementary identities: This process of fragmented consumption separating, splitting up and dividing previously homogeneous groups such as friends, the family, the neighbourhood, the local community, the town, the county, the country and importantly, is often linked to the process of fragmented identity construction.

 mobile telephony which is now able to construct multiple possibilities identities, at multiple moments in time and space. Think about the way we construct, our (multiple) digital identities, visible and varying across different digital platforms – work identity, social identity, family identity etc, which is most often not consistent with our analogue (human?) identity – look for example, at your profile pictures?

As an example, mobile telephony (both hardware and software) now appears to proliferate and connect every aspect of our lives, and generally does so from the perspective of consumption – consuming images, sounds, stories, messages etc – rather than production. We don’t make mobile phones, mobile networks (hardware) or Apps, content and platforms (software).

The loss of a meta-narrative:  concepts of PASTICHE and PARODY, as Fredric Jameson claimed that Postmodernism is characterized by pastiche rather than parody which represents a crisis in historicity. Jameson argued that parody implies a moral judgment or a comparison with previous societal norms. Whereas pastiche, such as collage and other forms of juxtaposition, occur without a normative grounding and as such, do not make comment on a specific historical moment. As such, Jameson argues that the postmodern era is characterised by pastiche (not parody) and as such, suffers from a crisis in historicity.

links to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s proposition that postmodernism holds an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives‘ (1979:7) those overarching ideas, attitudes, values and beliefs that have held us together in a shared belief, For example, the belief in religion, science, capitalism, communism, revolution, war, peace and so on. Lyotard points out that no one seemed to agree on what, if anything, was real and everyone had their own perspective and story. We have become alert to difference, diversity, the incompatibility of our aspirations, beliefs and desires, and for that reason, postmodernity is characterised by an abundance of micronarratives.^[28] It can be also characterised as an existence without meaning, as Žižek suggests it is an existence without ‘The Big Other’, an existentialistic crisis of existence when we realise we are alone (Lacan).

the distinction between culture and society is being eroded’ (231) and suggests that our sense of reality (the overarching metanarrative) appears to come from the culture (eg the media), rather than from society which is then reproduced, represented and relayed through media communication. In terms of media studies, this marks a juncture from previous conceptions of mass media communication, for example, as a ‘relay system’ – a process which just relays information and events in real-time to mass society or the conception of the media as a ‘window on the world’

societal perspective the ‘real’ seems to be imploding in on itself, a ‘process leading to the collapse of boundaries between the real and simulations’ (Barker & Emma, 2015:242). A process which the French intellectual Jean Baudrillard would describe as IMPLOSION which gives rise to what he terms SIMULACRA. The idea that although the media has always been seen as a representation of reality – a simulation, from Baudrillard’s perspective of implosion, it is has become more than a representation or simulation and it has become SIMULACRUM not just a representation of the real, but the reality itself, a grand narrative that is ‘truth‘ in its own right: an understanding of uncertain/certainty that Baudrillard terms the HYPERREAL.

Another way to understand this approach is to reflect on the emergence of, often off-shore, leisure and theme parks which are ‘highly commercialised, with many simulated environments more ‘real’ than the original from which they are copied’ (Urry 2014:81). Illustrating this point with references to ‘newly constructed sites of consumption excess’ (79) Urry highlights Macao described as ‘a laboratory of consumption, as the Chinese learn to be individualised consumers of goods and services being generated on an extraordinary scale’ (81). Or Dubai, which up to 1960 was one of the poorest places on earth and yet by the 2000s was the number one global site for ostentatious shopping’ and other forms of hyperreal consumption

Paul Gilroy: His theme of Double Consciousness, derived from W. E. B. Dubois, involves ‘Black Atlantic’ striving to be both European and Black through their relationship to the land of their birth and their ethnic political constituency

Gilroy highlights Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 ‘rivers of blood speech’ full of the ‘terrifying prospect of a wholesale reversal of the proper ordering of colonial power . . . intensified by feelings of resentment, rejection, and fear at the prospect of open interaction with others.’ (2004:111) Put presciently, ‘it has subsequently provided the justification for many a preemptive strike’ 

orientalism: the link between culture, imperial power and colonialism

 “Edward Said“:‘the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience’

“the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism”

‘an economic system like a nation or a religion lives not by bread alone, but by beliefs, visions, daydreams as well, and these may be no less vital to it for being erroneous’

Orient means the east

Suleri: The mode is characterised by ‘the desire to contain the intangibilities of the East within a western lucidity, but this gesture of appropriation only partially conceals the obsessive fear.

the East becomes the repository or projection of those aspects of themselves which Westerners do not choose to acknowledge cruelty, sensuality, decadence, laziness

Said: POSTCOLONIALISM operates a series of signs maintaining the European-Atlantic power over the Orient by creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness‘

universalist claims

Louis Althusser: ISA’s & the notion of ‘Interpellation’

“all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, through the functioning of the category of the subject”

we are Socially constructed and what socially constructs us is ‘despite its diversity and contradictions

Ideological state apparatus (ISA), is a theoretical concept developed by (Algerian born) French philosopher Louis Althusser which is used to describe the way in which structures of civic society – education, culture, the arts, the family, religion, bureaucracy, administration etc serve to structure the ideological perspectives of society, which in turn form our individual subject identity.

 ‘the category of the subject is the category constitutive of all ideology’ 

‘Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way to ‘recruit’ subjects among individuals . . . through the very precise operation that we call interpellation or hailing.

the way in which society calls/addresses / hails you is interpellation, which is the way in which your subject identity is formed and which, more often than not, corresponds to the dominant ideology.

Frantz Fanon

 Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique and appears to recognise the ‘mechanics of colonialism and its effects of those it ensnared‘ (McLeod 2000:20) when he remembers how he felt when, in France, white strangers pointed out his blackness, his difference, with derogatory phrases such as ‘dirty Nigger!

The Wretched of the Earth the development and ancestry of postcolonial criticism

1. Assimilation of colonial culture corresponding to the ‘mother country’ Chinua Achebe talks of the colonial writer as a ‘somewhat unfinished European who with patience guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European.’ (1988:46)
2. Immersion into an ‘authentic’ culture ‘brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted’
3. Fighting, revolutionary, national literature, ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’.

Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony

Alhussser drew part of his inspiration from Gramsci’ (Althusser, 2016: xxiv) the way in which class relations and the subject is ‘exercised through a whole set of institutions . . . the place where encounters between private individuals occur.’

Gramsci raises the concept of Hegemony to illustrate how certain cultural forms predominate over others, which means that certain ideas are more influential than others, usually in line with the dominant ideas, the dominant groups and their corresponding dominant interests.

 Said, notes how ‘consent is gained and continuously consolidated for the distant rule of native people and territories’

this form of cultural leadership is a process of (cultural) negotiation where consent is gained through persuasion, inculcation and acceptance. Where dominant ideas, attitudes and beliefs (= ideology) are slowly, subtly woven into our very being, so that they become ‘common sense’, a ‘normal’, ‘sensible’, obvious’ way of comprehending and acting in the world.

 way of reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness through image, sound, word, text, which in terms of postcolonialism, is ‘a flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.’ (Said)  In other words, ‘being a white man was, therefore, an idea and a reality

 hegemony is a struggle that emerges from NEGOTIATION and CONSENT. As such, it is not total domination (not totalitarianism or explicit propoganda) but a continual exchange of power, through ideas. In this sense, postcolonialism articulates a desire to reclaim, re-write and re-establish cultural identity and thus maintain power of The Empire

Paul Gilroy double consciousness

“Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack” — A proposal for a new flag for the UK and other socially engaged artwork by Gil Mualem-Doron

Paul Gilroy is insistent that ‘we must become interested in how the literary and cultural as well as governmental dynamics of the country have responded to that process of change and what it can tell us about the place of racism in contemporary political culture.’

postcolonial criticism the aim to understand and reconcile individual and national identity. Gilroy highlights Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 ‘rivers of blood speech’ full of the ‘terrifying prospect of a wholesale reversal of the proper ordering of colonial power intensified by feelings of resentment, rejection, and fear at the prospect of open interaction with others.’

‘cross-cultural’ interactions is indeed a characteristic of postcolonial criticism. Often found by foregrounding questions of cultural difference and diversity, as well as by celebrating ‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’. A unique position where ‘individuals may simultaneously belong to more than one culture – the coloniser and the colonised’. (2016:198) Even Fanon suggests an emphasis on identity as ‘doubled, or ‘hybrid’, or ‘unstable’.

feminism is linked to sexism

critical thinking: the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.

Operating at two points: institutional – Individual

suffragette = a woman seeking the right to vote through organized protest.

Laura Mulvey: polemical essay: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‘. 

Polemical essay: The term polemic is defined by Merriam-Webster as “an aggressive attack on or refutation of the opinions or principles of another.” A polemic essay is an essay in which one takes a strong stance for a particular idea or position, and, by virtue of that stance, takes a strong stance against the opposing idea or position 

There is an imbalance between woman and men: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role, women are simultaneously looked at and displayed and their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact

The Freudian psychoanalytic concept of scopophilia (‘taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ ie OBJECTIFICATION);

another is voyeurism (the sexual pleasure gained in looking);

another is fetishism (‘the quality of a cut-out . . . stylised and fragmented‘), the way in which parts of the female body are presented as something to be ‘looked at’ and therefore ‘objectified‘ and ‘sexualised‘ – ‘close-ups of legs . . . or a face‘, of lips, hips, bums, tums, thighs, legs and breasts, etc. etc) which are exaggerated through cinematic conventions of ‘scale’, ‘size’, ‘focus’.

Jacques Lacan (‘this mirror moment‘), highlighting the parallel between the ‘mirror stage’ of child development and the mirroring process that occurs between audience and screen – ‘a complex process of likeness and difference‘. We will never be able to truly see ourselves only reflections of our selves through others and media, like photos.

She also, discusses the position of the audience, categorising them as spectators who project their ‘repressed desire onto the performer‘.

Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like‘, thus, he must control the look, and thereby, the narrative. Made possible ‘by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify‘. Rules and conventions of mainstream narrative cinema, that appear to follow ‘according to the principles of the ruling ideology‘. In other words, the dominant look is always hetero, rather than homosexual.

Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s, coined by Naomi Wolf, it was a response to the generation gap between the feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s, challenging and recontextualising some of the definitions of femininity that grew out of that earlier period. In particular, the third-wave sees women’s lives as intersectional, demonstrating a pluralism towards race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and nationality when discussing feminism.

Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s, coined by Naomi Wolf, it was a response to the generation gap between the feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s, challenging and recontextualising some of the definitions of femininity that grew out of that earlier period. In particular, the third-wave sees women’s lives as intersectional, demonstrating a pluralism towards race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and nationality when discussing feminism.

Baker and jane: ‘rebellion of younger women against what was perceived as the prescriptive, pushy and ‘sex-negative’ approach of older feminists.’ 

put forward the following recognisable characteristics:

1. an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion

2. individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics

3. fluid and multiple subject positions and identities

4. cyberactivism

5. the reappropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes

6. sex positivity

Baker and jane: ‘rebellion of younger women against what was perceived as the prescriptive, pushy and ‘sex-negative’ approach of older feminists.’ 

Queer Theory. In the UK the pioneering academic presence in queer studies was the Centre for Sexual Dissidence in the English department at Sussex University, founded by Alan Sinfield and Johnathon Dollimore in 1990 (Barry: 141). In terms of applying queer theory to feminist critical thought, Judith Butler, among others expressed doubt over the reductionist, essentialist, approach towards the binary oppositions presented in terms of male/female; feminine/masculine, man/woman. Arguing, that this is too simple and does not account for the internal differences that distinguish different forms of gender identity, which according to Butler ‘tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes . . . normalising categories of oppressive structures‘

 Laura Mulvey seems to suggest that gender is fixed – male/female – that it is structured by institutions and those powerful individuals who are able to exert power and control – Weinstein et al. While still recognising those arguments presented by Mulvey, Jean Kilbourne, Sut Jhally and others, Butler suggests that gender is fluid, changeable, plural a set of categories to be played out and performed by individual subjects in individual moments in time and space.

Put another, it suggests that we have multiple identities that are performed to different people, in different social settings, under different social conditions. For example, look at categories such as lipstick lesbian, butch and femme, girly-girl and so on, which illustrate the multiple, plural nature of identity, representation and performance with feminist critical thinking.

“The Language”

Narrative: a story

There is a difference between narrative,story and plot.

Plot: The MC is feeling alone as he is separated from his friends and they are feeling the same and as they think, time passes by

Claude Levi-Strauss(binary oppositions)

we do not know what truth or meaning is but we know what it isn’t

eg: Black-White Good-Bad Rich-Poor

Vladimir Propp (character Types and Function)

Character types: a character type is a certain trait or role a character will have to progress the story = examples are the Hero(protagonist), Villain (antagonist), princess(the character who gets rescued in one way or form) etc.

-hero

helper

princess

villian

victim

dispatcher

father

false hero

Seymour chatman: Satellites and kernels

kernels main elements of the stories that if changed,affected the story greatly

Eg: The film is a sci-fi planet but then goes normal

satellites are changeable elements of the stories that wont affect the story to much

Eg. he has a blue hat in part 1 but in part 2 changes to a black hat