SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual.

Talks about post-modernism

German – song

Surface level – style over substance

we are more interested in the surface of an object than its’ inner meaning.

A good place to look for illustrations of postmodern culture, in terms of media studies, is the music video. 

disconnect between artist and art in music video.

In Legacy – music video – there is no narrative theme and structure – just simply visuals.

copied from DrM

Key Thinkers

Although Postmodernism sometimes refers to architectural movements in the 1930’s the most significant emergent point is to be found in the 1980’s with clear philosophical articulations from eminent thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson and others. From which develop a number of key terms which are important to understand as they not only shed light on what is clearly a complicated and confusing topic, but they also form the body of knowledge that students are most likely to be assessed on.

The loss of a metanarrative

A good starting point would be to return to the 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.