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20 Nov 09

Slavoj Žižek - Violence Interview (part 1/5)

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30 Apr 09

Gilles Deleuze [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

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deleuze philosophy postmodernism

empiricist and a vitalist
multiplicity, constructivism, difference and desire
13 more annotations...
- no good and evil, but rather only relationships which are beneficial or harmful to the particular individuals
- philosophical “encounters” that led him to new concepts
- constructivist
- philosophers are creators
- shifting relationship to the
  
  history of philosophy
- two main problems with the traditional style and institutional location of the
  
  history of philosophy
- The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought.
  
  It has played the repressors role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes,
  
  Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-so's book about them? A formidable school of intimidation which
  
  manufactures specialists in thought - but which also makes those who stay outside conform all
  
  the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been
  
  formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.
- The history of philosophy isn't a particularly reflective discipline. It's rather like
  
  portraiture in painting. Producing mental, conceptual portraits. As in painting, you have to
  
  create a likeness, but in a different material: the likeness is something you have to produce,
  
  rather than a way of reproducing anything (which comes down to just repeating what a philosopher
  
  says)
- the concept of the
  
  fold to describe the nature of the human subject as the outside folded in: an immanently
  
  political, social, embedded subject
- I have always felt that I am an empiricist . . . [My empiricism] is derived from the two
  
  characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must
  
  itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find
  
  the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness).
  
  (D vii; cf. N 88; WP 7)
- differs sharply, at least apparently, from the
  
  traditional understanding canonised by Anglo-American histories of philosophy
- second is an
  
  active element: for Deleuze, empiricism is always about creating
- first is the rejection of all transcendentals

23 Jan 09

Jean Baudrillard in London

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30 Nov 08

Jean Baudrillard - SIMULACRA AND SIMULATIONS - 1998

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04 Aug 08

21 Jul 08

Boekbespreking "De fatale strategieën", J. Baudrillard

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Trouw Boekrecensies - Baudrillard, Fatale Strategieën

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10 May 08

Postmodern Thought

a large collection of links concerning postmodernism and its thinkers

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09 May 08

Mary Klages about Postmodernism

YAIP - yet another introduction to postmodernism

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General Introduction to Postmodernism

www.cla.purdue.edu/...intromainframe.html - Preview

philosophy theory postmodernism pomo culture

distinction
Postmodern Culture or "Postmodernity"
98 more annotations...
- Postmodern Theory or "Postmodernism"
- Social History of the Western Subject
- transformative but largely unnoticed changes effected by new technologies
- change as social situations change
- "What is
  a tree?"
- idea of authorship and of the ownership of original work are integrally
  connected to the establishment of literate culture
- questions of honor and shame
- communal literate source
- oral culture
- only
  oral stories
- no written source
- Money, production, consumption and labor could not be understood as
  abstract quantitites
- justice had to be determined by way of competing accounts and in a case-by-case
  manner
- the
  "materiality" of the individual's labor
- by force closer to
- one cements bonds between people through the circulation of gifts
- no mere coincidence that the most powerful God,
  Zeus, is precisely the God of hospitality
- women as gifts
- sacrifice
- Renaissance
- "guilt culture,"
- introduction
  of print reproduction
- effect of permanence
- also
  brings religion to the individual reader
- a time of questioning and scientific discovery
- and
  a time of political revolution
- the movement into a monotheistic belief system
- the beginning of the internalization of epic values
- identity suddenly becomes "vertical," existing on a deep scale
  of internal struggle
- In short, the private self is invented
- One can see elements of this transition in the movement from the Old
  Testament's "jealous God," Jahweh, to the sacrificing Christ
  of the New Testament
- Restoration/
  Enlightenment:
- retrenchment
- culture seems to subscribe more
  to the values of a shame culture rather than a guilt culture
- Even represented
  family situations
- underlines the formal
  and performative aspects of what is clearly a scene
- Age of Reason. Hierarchy, convention and
  the status quo are valued
- the emphasis on reason also leads to the precepts
  of eighteenth-century humanism
- true will always be the same
  as the good and the right (and the beautiful)
- The American Revolution
- The French Revolution
- The rise of the middle classes
- the rise
  of capitalism as the predominant way to conceive of business relations
- The Industrial Revolution
- Urbanization
- Increasing literacy rates
- This expansion of the reading audience made it possible for
  our modern mass market to become possible
- effects of these changes on the idea of the subject
- individual subject is seen as valued, a new emphasis
  is placed on internal feelings and inspiration
- move epic form away from external battles and
  inwards towards the formation of an individual subject
- rise of urbanization
  leads to a counter-reaction: artists begin to extol the value of nature,
  including sublime landscapes like mountains and oceans that would have
  been considered forbidding by early-eighteenth-century aestheticians
- formation of the Romantic hero
- firmly entrenched
  in guilt culture
- the rise of autobiography
  as a genre
- emergent
  mass market
- new emphasis on individualism
- Caspar David Friedrich's
  "Wanderer"
- invited to take on his point-of-view
- experience his
  emotions before the grandeur of the scene before him.
- final establishment of
  the middle class as the dominant ruling class
- formation
  of a mass market
- establish the novel as the middle class' primary
  artistic form
- turns away
  from the exotic experimentation of Romantic poetry and instead offers
  a critique of Romantic ideals
- Victorian architecture
  (particularly the centrality of the hearth and the separation of rooms
  by hallways) helps to establish spaces where private identity and domesticity
  can be established
- There is still a belief
  among many thinkers in concepts such as truth and progress; however, the
  means taken to achieve utopic goals are often extreme
- fascism, nazism, communism,
  anarchism
- surrealism,
  dadaism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, existentialism, primitivism,
  minimalism, etc.
- this radicalism is driven by a sense that
  Enlightenment values may be suspect. Modernists therefore participate
  in a general questioning of all the values held dear by the Victorian
  period (narrative, referentiality, religion, progress, bourgeois domesticity,
  capitalism, utilitarianism, decorum, empire, industry, etc.)
- In general, there is a fear that things
  have gone off track
- self-reflexivity
- an exploration of psychological
  and subjective states
- alternative ways of thinking about representation
- radical experimentation in form
- fragmentation in form and representation
- extreme ambiguity and simultaneity in structure
- some experimentation in the breakdown between high
  and low forms
- the use of parody and irony
- postmodern artists and theorists continue
  the sorts of experimentation that we can also find in modernist works,
  including the use of self-consciousness, parody, irony, fragmentation,
  generic mixing, ambiguity, simultaneity, and the breakdown between high
  and low forms of expression
- others
  prefer to represent the move into postmodernism as a more radical break
- Many date postmodernity from the sixties when we witnessed the rise of
  postmodern architecture; however, some critics prefer to see WWII as the
  radical break from modernity, since the horrors of nazism (and of other
  modernist revolutions like communism and Maoism) were made evident at
  this time
- extreme self-reflexivity
- In modernism, self-reflexivity tended to be used by "high"
  artists in difficult works (eg. Picasso's painting above); in postmodernism,
  self-reflexive strategies can be found in both high art and everything
  from Seinfeld to MTV
- postmodern architecture, this effect is achieved
  by keeping visible internal structures and engineering elements
- irony and parody
- a breakdown between high and low cultural forms
- Postmodernists
  by contrast often employ pop and mass-produced objects in more immediately
  understandable ways, even if their goals are still often complex (eg.
  Andy Warhol's commentary on mass production and on the commercial aspects
  of "high" art through the exact reproduction of a set of Cambell's
  Soup boxes—on the left)
- retro
- fascinated with styles and fashions from the past,
  which they will often use completely out of their original context
- Jameson and Baudrillard tend to read this tendency as a
  symptom of our loss of connection with historical temporality
- a questioning of grand narratives
- visuality and the simulacrum
  vs. temporality
- As a result, Baudrillard and others have argued (for example, through
  the notion of the simulacrum)
  that we have lost all connection to reality or history
- keeps coming back to the idea that the line separating
  reality and representation has broken down
- (Wag the Dog, Dark
  City, the Matrix, the Truman Show, etc.)
- late capitalism
- disorientation
- attempts to
  disorient the subject entering its space
- secondary orality

08 May 08

Introduction to Jean Baudrillard, Module on Postmodernity

An introduction to Baudrillard's writings. Furthermore, the root of this site provides an introduction to postmodern theory in general.

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baudrillard philosophy postmodernism theory

22 Mar 08

Postmodernism and the 'Death of the Subject' by James Heartfield

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philosophy postmodernism

> to throw or cast
arose out of the philosophy called ‘phenomenology’ and the sociological outlook influenced by the linguistic theory ‘structuralism’
52 more annotations...
- John Paul II
- a dramatic experience has ensured the collapse of rationalist optimism, which viewed history as the triumphant progress of reason, the source of all happiness and freedom’
- Jean-François Lyotard
- modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse ... making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative
- postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives.
- defined as a time when we could do away with the ideologies upon which we had relied
- implications of the theory
- not immediately clear
- hostile to subjectivity.
- first and foremost charged with an excessive subjectivity that jeopardised objectivity
- scepticism towards a singular objective truth
- critics pointed to the promiscuous way that the postmodernists deconstructed each and every scientific and moral certainty as if these were no more than big stories, meta or grand narratives.
- metanarratives reduced complexity to self-sameness, the method of deconstruction restored the fundamental difference of things
- deconstruction was not only directed outward towards the objective world
- grandest of all narratives, that of the Subject itself, would not remain untouched
- Jacques Derrida
- implication is that the Subject, too, cannot be assumed to be a unitary whole without difference, but rather, must in turn, itself be deconstructed
- Derrida indicates that Heidegger’s appeal to the Spirit of the West is a perverse outcome of the rational Subject of Enlightenment thinking
- the narratives of freedom and democracy are being criticised because they imply the emancipation of a Subject
- How readily he associates democracy and fascism!
- The common bond between fascism and democracy is not incidental, but a fatal flaw; and the specific bond that Derrida alights upon is subjectivity
- Lacoue-Labarthe
- Louis Althusser
- Subject is an effect of the ideology, not the other way around. Ordinary thinking would have it that persons — Subjects — have ideas, or perhaps more cynically that an ideology is crafted to deceive these Subjects about their true conditions
- even the idea of oneself as a Subject, author of your own destiny, is an illusion fostered by ideology
- Althusser
- creation of the Subject is one of repression, not liberation
- Michel Foucault
- modern institutions from the prison, through the schools and the hospitals are all involved in the disciplining of bodies through techniques of surveillance and interview. The all-pervasive gaze of these new authorities transfixes the individual, making him a Subject with guilt and conscience
- following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject
- how can it be that the subject, taken to be the condition for and instrument of agency, is at the same time the effect of subordination, understood as the deprivation of agency?
- jacere,
- to throw or cast
- historical subjection of the sovereign power to democratic control gives us the more contemporary meaning of Subject as master of his own destiny
- Subject formation becomes enslavement rather than liberation
- reversal of meanings
- begins with the critique
- Specifically
- of objectification
- feminist thinkers
- pornography
- woman-object
- male-subject
- is objectification a necessary consequence of subjectification?
- a Subject, a hero, implies objectification and degradation?
- All subjectivity would be compromised as complicit in the degradation of others
- Althusser completed the account of history as a process without a Subject
- The view that the individual is socialised into given roles was already part of the canon of Western sociology.^[37] Indeed it is an idea that goes back to the anti-Enlightenment reaction that sought to emphasise the priority of the social whole over individual rights
- price to pay
- theoretical degradation of the Subject is closer to reality than a naive reassertion of natural rights could be
- But
- No sooner is a proposition made than it can be deconstructed

Deconstructivism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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deconstructivism philosophy postmodernism

fragmentation,
manipulating ideas of a structure's surface or skin
62 more annotations...
- 1980s.
- stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos
- embrace a general trend within contemporary architecture
- Jacques Derrida
- influenced
- move architecture away from
- "form follows function," "purity of form," and "truth to materials."
- constricting 'rules' of modernism
- relationship with Postmodernism is also decidedly contrary
- opposition to the ordered rationality of Modernism
- decisive break between the two movements
- Deconstruction
- confrontational stance toward much of architecture and architectural history
- historical references that modernism had shunned
- postmodernism
- embrace
- ironically
- rejects the idea of ornament as an after-thought or decoration
- deconstructivism
- Oppositions
- Complexity and Contradiction
- argues against the purity, clarity and simplicity of modernism
- postmodernist and deconstructivist readings
- postmodern reading
- ornament and historical allusion added a richness to architecture that modernism had foregone
- signs and ornament can be applied to a pragmatic architecture
- semiology.
- deconstructivist reading
- the functional aspects of buildings were called into question
- Geometry was to deconstructivists what ornament was to postmodernists, the subject of complication
- example
- deconstructs it
- takes the typical unadorned white cube of modernist
- geometries
- abstract expressionism
- cubism
- subverts the functional aspects of modernist simplicity
- Peter Eisenman's Wexner Center for the Arts
- Vitra Design Museum
- presupposition is that architecture is a language capable of communicating meaning and of receiving treatments by methods of linguistic philosophy
- presence and absence, or solid and void
- readings of texts are best carried out when working with classical narrative structures. Any architectural deconstruction requires the existence of a particular archetypal construction, a strongly-established conventional expectation to play flexibly agains
- Derrida, readings of texts are best carried out when working with classical narrative structures. Any architectural deconstruction requires the existence of a particular archetypal construction, a strongly-established conventional expectation to play flexibly against
- notions of trace and erasure
- "metaphysics of presence,"
- inspiration from the Russian Constructivist and Futurist
- Both
- concerned with the tectonics of making an abstract assemblage
- with the radical simplicity of geometric forms as the primary artistic content
- tendency toward purism, though, is absent in Deconstructivism
- also had an impact
- raw structuralism of constructivist architects
- Rem Koolhaas.
- Analytical cubism had a sure effect
- as forms and content are dissected and viewed from different perspectives simultaneously.
- shares with minimalism a disconnection from cultural references. It also often shares with minimalism notions of conceptual art.
- tendency toward deformation and dislocation
- aspect of expressionism
- essential tool in most aspects of contemporary architecture, but the particular nature of deconstrucivism makes the use of computers especially pertinent
- very complex spaces
- mass production
- modular elements

12 Mar 08

Reactie op "De dialectiek van de Verlichting" door Leo Apostel

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enlightenment philosophy postmodernism theory

04 Feb 08

MITPress Leornardo Books

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30 Dec 07

The Work Of Art in the Age Of Digital Reproduction

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aesthetics art culture newmedia postmodernism theory

Peter Lyman
the cybernetic premise upon which computer
programs were based led inevitably to the centralization of control
1 more annotations...
- Here is where the aura
  resides. In the originality of the moment when we see, hear, read, repeat,
  revise. Not in the thing itself

29 Dec 07

'The Postmodern Condition A Report on Knowledge' by Lyotard

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culture newmedia philosophy postmodernism theory

>
> as did advancements in human circulation (transportation systems) and later, in the circulation of sounds and visual images (the media).
status of knowledge is altered
72 more annotations...
- postindustrial age
- societies
- cultures
- hypothesis
- postmodern age
- 1950s,
- completion of reconstruction
- point of departure
- Scientific knowledge
- last forty years the “leading” sciences and technologies have had to do with language
- technological transformations
- research and the transmission of acquired learning
- two principal functions
- considerable impact on knowledge
- proliferation of information-processing machines
- an effect on the circulation of learning
- as did advancements in human circulation (transportation systems) and later, in the circulation of sounds and visual images (the media).
- ning
  > as
- new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language
- hegemony of computers
- certain logic
- prescriptions
- thorough exteriorisation of knowledge with respect to the “knower,”
- Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange
- knowledge has become the principle force of production over the last few decades
- major bottleneck for the developing countries
- gap between developed and developing countries will grow ever wider
- nation-states will one day fight for control of information
- ideology of communicational “transparency,” which goes hand in hand with the commercialisation of knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and “noise.”
- multi-national corporations
- visualise learning circulating along the same lines as money
- “payment knowledge” and “investment knowledge”
- flows of knowledge travelling along identical channels of identical nature, some of which would be reserved for the “decision makers,” while the others would be used to repay each person’s perpetual debt with respect to the social bond
- fails to challenge the general paradigm of progress in science and technology, to which economic growth and the expansion of sociopolitical power seem to be natural complements
- scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge
- In the first place,
- narrative knowledge
- second point – the scientists’ demoralisation has an impact on the central problem of legitimation
- Legitimation is the process by which a legislator is authorised to promulgate such a law as a norm
- The point is that there is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics: they both stem from the same perspective, the same “choice” if you will – the choice called the Occident
- who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided? In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government
- emphasising facts of language and in particular their pragmatic aspect
- prescriptions
- Wittgenstein,
- each of the various categories of utterance can be defined in terms of rules specifying their properties and the uses to which they can be put
- language games
- three observations about language games
- their rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a contract, explicit or not, between players
- that if there are no rules, there is no game, that even an infinitesimal modification of one rule alters the nature of the game, that a “move” or utterance that does not satisfy the rules does not belong to the game
- every utterance should be thought of as a “move” in a game
- first principle underlying our method as a whole: to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics
- the second principle
- the observable social bond is composed of language “moves.”
- If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly developed contemporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what methodological representation to apply to that society
- two basic representational models for society
- Talcott Parsons
- Marxist current
- mpossible to know what the state of knowledge is
- without knowing something of the society within which it is situated
- One can decide that the principal role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society, and act in accordance with that decision, only if one has already decided that society is a giant machine
- Conversely, one can count on its critical function, and orient its development and distribution in that direction, only after it has been decided that society does not form an integrated whole, but remains haunted by a principle of oppositions
- It is tempting to avoid the decision altogether by distinguishing two kinds of knowledge
- positivist kind
- critical, reflexive, or hermeneutic kind
- I find this partition solution unacceptable
- no longer relevant for the societies with which we are concerned
- Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made
- A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before
- one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass
- the system can and must encourage such movement to the extent that it combats its own entropy, the novelty of an unexpected “move,” with its correlative displacement of a partner or group of partners, can supply the system with that increased performativity it forever demands and consumes
- language games are the minimum relation required for society to exist
- The atoms are placed at the crossroads of pragmatic relationships, but they are also displaced by the messages that traverse them, in perpetual motion