Thursday, 13 February 2014

Postmodernism

The 'basics' of postmodernism

- It is essentially the breakdown of barriers of what is perceived as real and what is real.

- It could be between: 
  • High art and low art
  • Organic and artificial
  • Male and female
  • Between texts themselves
  • And between what is real and what is not
  • Old and new
  • Past and present
- The Desert of the Real (The Matrix)
______________

- Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)

- He argues our society has become so reliant on representations that we have  lost contact with the real.

- There is no distinction between reality and representation, only the simulacrum

- Simulacrum - a copy that now has more reality than the object it is a copy of.

Creating the simulacrum

- You start with a real object

- The object then becomes a representation

- The representation then becomes more important and 'real' to us than the original, it is hyperreal

- This fundamentally destroys the original eventually meaning everything is a copy

- Future representations are the copies of a copy and so on

Therefore…

- Baudrillard has a problem with the idea of representation

- Representation implies there was something there originally to represent

- But in his view, how can one represent something that does not exist?
______________

Is it possible to create a generic construction of a pop video that is also original?

In what ways is youth culture in 'Teenager from Outer Space' represented as a simulacrum?

If we accept Little Mix as a girl group rather than 4 individuals that sing, are they post-modernist?

Is something a simulacrum when we know it's a simulacrum?

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