Taming the Hydra - Perspectives

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Today's final lecture was on the overall idea of Postmodernism as a hydra, and how its many facets can be approached.


Research

  • Federic Jameson - The Cultural Turn (1998)
  • Sokal Hoax
  • Dick Hebdige - Hiding in the light (1988)


  • Federic Jameson: "The concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even understood."
  • Postmodernism is a disputed term:
    • Origins - when did it begin?
      • Demolition of Pruitt-Igoe (1972)
      • Fountain - Marcel Duchamp (1917)
      • Tristram Shandy - Laurence Stern (1759)
    • Partially connected to rise of commercialism etc
  • "The postmodern is deliberately exclusive as a concept, avoiding as much as possible the modernist desire to clasify and thereby delimit, bound and confine."
  • Postmodernism is exhausted - been taught for a long time in art  and humanities - not exhausted as still in media
  • Postmodernism is nothing without modernism
  • Modernism - affirms power of humans, create, improve and reshape environment, scientific knowledge, teach and practical experimentation - progressive & optimistic
    • Enlightenment project (1668-1789)
    • Francis Galton - Composite Portraits (c. 1883)
    • Edvard Munch - The Scream (1895)
    • Le Corbusier - Villa Savoye (1929)
    • Structuralism - "Define meanings by reference to an ultimate structure which exists prior to history and the social in the structure of the human mind."
  • Meta narrative - Jean-Francois Lyotard
    • A story that functions to legitimize ideology (eg. Capitalism, Marxism, Religions etc.)
    • Legitimize representations of reality as 'real' and therefore 'true'
  • "Whereas modernism seeks closure in form and is concerned with conclusions, postmodernism is open, unbounded, and concerned with process and "becoming""
    • Thomas Ruff - Other Portrait (1994-5)
    • Ghostface - Scream
    • Celebration Town
    • Derrida

Key Players

  • Jean-Francois Lyotard - Meta narratives
  • Roland Barthes - Author/Critics
  • Derrida - deconstruction/Binary opposition
  • Jean Baudrillard - Hyper realism
All say your world is constructed. 


  • "Truth is always relative to the differing standpoints and predisposing interlectual frameworks of the judging subject." - Christopher Butler
  • "We live not inside reality, but inside our representations of it."
    • Truman Show
    • Nott & Gliddon - Indigenous races of the earth (1857)
    • Alice through the looking glass - Lewis Carroll (1871)
    • Hitler's Aryan Race

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