A theory to help us understand who we are now and the times that we are living in. – linked to media, photography (other creative things)

A complicated and fragmentary set of inter-relationships, a practice of re-imagination

Pastiche is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist

Parody is a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony

New iterations

We live in a society of surface signs

Loss of the metanarrative (we don’t know what the big picture is, we only know small fragments of the story)

BRICOLAGE is a useful term to apply to postmodernist texts as it ‘involves the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’ (Barker & Jane, 2016:237)

Too much of something eventually becomes pointless (excessively saturated by things)

Hyperreality – nothing is real or seems real

Uncertainty – insecurity of knowing or not knowing things

Baudrillard – we live in a hyperreal, simulated reality where we can’t always know what to trust.

There is no real ‘you’ just an idea of what you look like, and people change themselves to look and appear as they want to.

This structural approach could also be referenced to Freytag’s Pyramid exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement

stories use STOCK CHARACTERS to structure stories.

NARRATIVES (=myths) are STRUCTURED around BINARY OPPOSITIONS eg: good v evil; human v alien; young v old etc etc.

Kernels = Important to be in the narrative for it to make sense

Satellites = moments in the narrative that could be removed and wouldn’t cause too much disruption

Todrov = beginning middle and end

Roland Barthes: Proairetic and Hermenuetic Codes

Not in real time

elision and ellipsis – when you drop something out eg. a chunk of time because otherwise if the film was in real time it would be very boring

Flashbacks and Flashforwards

Parallel or simultaneous narrative

Keep the audience active to fill in the gaps – create puzzles or enigmas (encourage the audience to want more information)

Dramatic Irony – the audience know something that the characters don’t

Foreshadowing

Non-sequitars – aspects of the story that is irrelevant and doesn’t go anywhere eventually (adds interest)

Light and Shade – lighter/slightly comical scenes to break up the dark

A way of seeing and understanding the world at the moment – a good way of thinking about it is through music videos.

RE-IMAGINING, PASTICHE, PARODY, COPY, BRICOLAGE

Parody v Pastiche 

Pastiche is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist

Parody is a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony

Bricolage

Rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning

Intertexuality – suggests signs only have meaning in reference to other signs and that meaning is therefore a complex process of decoding/encoding with individuals both taking and creating meaning in the process of reading texts.

For example, the fragmentary, decentred nature of music videos that break up traditional understandings of time and space so that audiences are ‘no longer able to distinguish ‘fiction’ from ‘reality’,

. . . the concept that the meaning of a text does not reside in the text, but is produced by the reader in relation not only to the text in question, but also the complex network of texts invoked in the reading process.

This may be frivolous, trite, casual, surface, throw-away. It may even be ironic, joking, or literally, ‘just playing’

As Shuker notes, two points are frequently made about music videos: ‘their preoccupation with visual style, and associated with this, their status as key exemplars of ‘postmodern’ texts.’

Surface and style over substance – ‘in a postmodern world, surfaces and style become the most important defining features of the mass media and popular culture‘ 

Richard Hogart – noted the shift in modern societies particularly the impact on our ‘neighborhood lives’, which was ‘an extremely local life, in which everything is remarkably near‘ (1959:46)

In other words, there is an argument that postmodern culture is a consumer culture, where the emphasis on style eclipses the emphasis on utility or need.

Think, for example, about 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.

Fragmentary consumption = Fragementary identities.

• Individual consumption
• Fragmented identity construction
• So in summary, the focus on FRAGMENTATION OF IDENTITY is characterised and linked to an increase of consumption and the proliferation of new forms of digital technologies. In effect, another key characteristic of postmodernism is the development of fragmented, alienated individuals living (precariously) in fragmented societies.
• Postmodern world is a precarious

From a 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)

The loss of a metanarrative

Metanarrative = Meta– big Narrative – story

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 real itself, a grand narrative that is ‘truth‘ in its own right: an understanding of uncertain/certainty that Baudrillard terms the HYPERREAL.

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.

 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.

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 real itself, a grand narrative that is ‘truth‘ in its own right: an understanding of uncertain/certainty that Baudrillard terms the HYPERREAL. – the exaggerated reality is real

Reflexivity

Lens of Empire and Colonialism

 postcolonial criticism challenges the assumption of a universal claim towards what constitutes ‘good reading’ and ‘good literature’

Orientalism – the link between culture, imperial power and colonialism

the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism Edward Said Culture and Imperialism, 1993: xii

‘In this view, the outlying regions of the world have no life, history or culture to speak of, no independence or integrity worth representing without the West.‘ (Said, 1993: xxi). Orientalism (1978) alongside Culture and Imperialism (1993) are key texts written by the respected academic Edward Said. He asked if ‘imperialism was principally economic‘ and looked to answer that question by highlighting ‘the privileged role of culture in the modern imperial experience’ (1997:3)

You have the power to narrate and the power to

Orientalism

Allowing people to tell stories and make people think certain things

creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness‘. (Said, 1978:238) – almost creating a lens to make people believe that the west is a certain way

Idea that the orient is exotic – there is a false misconception of what the world is like

Assertion of western power over the east

Orientalism makes the cultures and histories irrelevant as these things turn into stereotypes

Builds a systemic world view

Legitimizes cheap things (slavery)

Systemic racism

Jacques Lacan – the mirror stage of child development, whereby, as ‘we cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not. ‘

 Applying that theory to culture, communications and media studies, it is possible to see why we are so obsessed with reading magazines, listening to music, watching films, videos and television because, essentially, we are exploring ‘The Other’ as a way of exploring ourselves.

To link this to postcolonialism would be to suggest that the West uses the East / the Orient / the ‘Other’, to identify and construct itself. 

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

He says we are socially constructed – framework (ideological state apparatus (ISA) ) they all impact to socially construct us

Ideas that shape us are ideas from the dominant figures

Interpelate you to make you think a certain way and to agree to things

Frantz Fanon

He says its okay to say you disagree with things, but what are you actually going to do about it?

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’.

Understand different cultures, then identify your own culture and then understand what you can do to create a revolution.

Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony

Suggests that you can change the framework and hegemony is a sort of tug of war for power. You could change the way we think about things through culture.

Hegemonic Struggle

Paul Gilroy – Double Consciousness

‘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.’ (2004:13)

W.E.B. Dubois

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 follow this wiki link for more on this point.

As Barry notes the stress on ‘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’.

Slave owners were compensated 20 million pounds for the loss of their slaves.

Representation is about voices, stories and characters the we DON’T SEE as much as voices, stories and characters that we do see. It’s also about giving a context and understanding to the stories we see and hear.

Theorists

Jacques Lacan – (Mirror theory) – Post colonialism is how we see each other and how we see ourselves.

Edward Said – Orientalism – people are put into categories and stereotypes (framed)

Louis Althusser – ideological stay apparatus Interpellation – being formed by the things around us (the way in which we are made/constructed).

Gramsci – hegemonic struggle – you can change and you can reclaim

Systemic, Societal Sexism

• Misogyny – hatred of women
• Patriarchy – a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership
• Level of institution – sexism or discrimination in companies
• Individual – operating at the level of women (poster, picture, music video etc)

1st Wave of Feminism

• Suffragettes
• galvanised by organisations such as, the British Womens Suffrage Commitee (1867)

2nd Wave

• Nevertheless, feminist critical thought became much more prominent and pronounced during the counter cultural movements of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, which heralded, among other changes: the facilitating of birth control and divorce, the permitting of abortion and homosexuality, the abolition of hanging and theatre censorship.
• In contrast, ‘at the beginning of the 1970’s the Women’s Liberation Movement set great store by the process of consciousness raising’

Laura Mulvey

• ‘the camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion‘
• 1st wave
• Narrative Cinema
• Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
• Male Gaze = pleasure is masculine – aimed towards man – woman as image, man as bearer of the look
• She argues that there is a sexual imbalance, there’s a split between male and female
• Women are exhibitionists (there to dance, move draw attention) men are there to look
•  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’.
• Scopophilia – the pleasure in looking (‘taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ 
• Vouyerism – the sexual pleasure gained in looking – skewed to the male experience
• Fetishism – when you focus on one specific thing over another (usually sexualised) – therefore objectifying women and de-humanises them.
• Also draws on Jacques Lacan – child development – proposes that when you are born you have no idea who you are and have no concioucness
• Lacan – The Mirror Stage = there is a moment where we recognize who we are = the moment we realise who we are
• The Other = we never see ourselves and we have only ever seen a reflection of ourselves – In media we are always looking at mirrors and that leads us to believe who we are.
• Not good for women as women are then going to grow up thinking themselves as ‘man wants a woman’ and will assume that the way women are on the screen is the way that women should be – this is unhealthy.

• Feminist = a political position
• Female = a matter of biology
• Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics

Sut Jhally

• Dreamworld- looking at music videos and how women are portrayed
• Female sexuality was used to portray and advertise brands and songs
• Shows how culture expects us to be men and women
•  At the centre of the dreamworld is the female body and drawing on the key concepts introduced by Mulvey (objectification, voyeurism, scopophilia, fetishism) it is clear both how the dreamworld is constructed and who it appears to be constructed for.

3rd Wave Feminism

• Sometimes known as raunch culture:

‘Raunch culture is the sexualised performance of women in the media that can play into male stereotypes of women as highly sexually available, where its performers believe they are powerful owners of their own sexuality’Hendry & Stephenson (2018:50

• Old ideasof feminism became outdated and the phrase ‘Feminism’ seemed almost derogatory

According to Barker and Jane (2016), third wave feminism, which is regarded as having begun in the mid-90’s is the ‘rebellion of younger women against what was perceived as the prescriptive, pushy and ‘sex negative’ approach of older feminists.’ (344) and put forward the following recognisable characteristics:

• an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion
• individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics
• fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
• cyberactivism
• the reappropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
• sex positivity

According to Ariel Levy, in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs raunch culture is ‘a product of the unresolved feminist sex wars – the conflict between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution‘ (2006:74). In other words, while on the one hand, the idea of liberation involves new freedoms for sexual exhibition, experimentation and presentation, on the other, it may well be playing out the same old patterns of exploitation, objectification and misogyny?

• Pluralism/Intersectionality – Initial critical ideas that looked at the plurality of feminist thought can be found in the early work around Queer Theory. In the UK the pioneering academic presence in queer studies was the Centre for Sexual Dissedence 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 distinguishes different forms of gender identity, which according to Butler ‘tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes . . . normalising categories of oppressive structures‘ (14:2004).
• 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.

4th Wave Feminism

• States that you are able to be whoever you want whenever and wherever

How useful are ideas about narrative in analysing music videos? Refer to the close study products ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘Letter to the Free’ in your answer. (9 marks)

Narrative theory is a structuralist approach to a story which focuses on a video or story having a clear beginning middle and end. There can be different forms of narrative theory and lots of different people have different views on what the theory consists of. The theory can be very useful when analysing music videos, as some aspects of the theory can be relatable to the story being told in the video. In general, music videos aim to either tell a story or make a point. In the case of the music videos for ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘Letter to the Free’, the videos do not necessarily link with Todrov’s tripartite narrative structure and don’t have a clear beginning middle and end, however, they do link with some aspects of narrative theory. 

In ‘Ghost Town’, the main aim of both the song and the video, were to express the problems that were happening in society in the early 1980’s during Margret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. Although the video doesn’t have a clear beginning middle and end, it does include Kernels and Satellites. The kernels of this video are the panoramic shots of the city and its empty and desolate streets. Without this scenery and gloomy feel, the images would not match up with the lyrics of the song. The lyrics ‘this town is looking like a ghost town’ wouldn’t make sense with a shot of the streets bustling with people, therefore, the kernel in this video is the empty streets. The satellites in this video are small things like the outfits the band members are wearing. 

On the other hand, in Common’s ‘Letter to the Free’, there is very few examples of narrative structure in the music video, as there is no clear storyline or chronological order. Every figure in the video is either a member of the band or a singer, aiming to portray the message that Common wants to get across about the issues surrounding racial injustice in the USA. Because of these factors, I would argue that narrative structure has not been useful in this music video as no theorists’ ideas are present within this video.

To conclude, in some ways it is possible to link narrative theory to music videos, as in general, those videos aim to tell some sort of story, and often do follow Todrov’s tripartite structure with a clear beginning, middle and end, however this is not always the case and sometimes there is no clear structure (like Letter to the Free). 

• Structuralist approach.
• Narrative is to do with time and how it is used.
• Beginning, middle and end.
• Time can be linear, non linear, sequential or non sequential.
• Chronological order.
• Space can be moved around, altered and changed in order to create a story.
• Space can be organised.
• Theme that links it all together (eg. Family) .
• Narrative, story and plot.
• Narrative = the overall thing.
• Story = about a specific story.
• Plot = what happens with these characters and the main theme/narrative.
• Tztevan Todorov = Bulgarian film/cultural theorist = Tripartite narrative structure. (3 part narrative structure = beginning, middle and end).
• Narratives start as an EQUILIBRIUM then gets DISRUPTED so then there is a NEW EQUILIBRIUM.
• Freytag – dramatic structure – exposition (character, place, introducing everything), climax (big event to create a story/conflict), Denouement (resolution)
• Doesn’t have to go in that order.
• Vladimir Propp – Character Types and Functions = stock characters perform stock actions – you know what they are going to do (predictable) .
• Different stages of a story.
• Claude Levi-Strauss = looking at individuals and the way people are in different parts of the world. Found the similarities between different societies from the stories that they all tell. He found that the stories were generally about binary oppositions.
• Telling stories about what is good and bad.
• We never know what is, we only know what isn’t. We don’t know who we are, we only know what we are not.
• Narratives play out a binary opposition by showing what is good and bad.
• Contrasting opposites
• Seymour Chatman = You can divide stories into two parts
• Kernels = big parts of the story that if they were taken out, the story would not make sense.
• Satellites = things that can be changed and it won’t drastically effect the story. They are used for embellishment and can be adapted. Character looks for example, can be satellites and can be changed without the story being really effected.

I think my video will include a main character whom