Post Modernism in Media

BAUDRILLARDJAMESON LYOTARD

OBJECTIVES

• To introduce aspects of postmodern style/aesthetic

• To introduce aspects of postmodern form (narrative, genre)

KEY TERMS

SIMULACRA, PARODY & PASTICHE, HYPERREALITY, BRICOLAGE,INTERTEXTUALITY,HYBRIDITY,DISLOCATION FROM TIME & SPACE

What is Post Modern Media?• Postmodern media rejects the idea that any media product or text is of any greater value than another. All judgements of value are merely taste.

• Anything can be art, anything can deserve to reach an audience, and culture ‘eats itself’as there is no longer anything new to produce or distribute.

• The distinction between media and reality has collapsed, and we nowlive in a ‘reality’ defined by images and representations – a state ofsimulacrum. Images refer to each other and represent each other asreality rather than some ‘pure’ reality that exists before the imagerepresents it – this is the state of hyper-reality.

• All ideas of ‘the truth’ are just competing claims – or discourses andwhat we believe to be the truth at any point is merely the ‘winning’discourse.

Postmodern Media as an STYLE aesthetic

• Hybridity - (the mixing and sampling of different kinds and levels - of hip hop music, of material in television ads, films, etc.) Postmodern texts 'raid the image bank' of popular culture which is so richly available through video and computer technologies, recyclesome old movies and shows on television, the Internet etc. Music, film and TV provide excellent examples of these processes.

Bricolage• This is used to refer to the process of adaptation

or improvisation where aspects of one style are given quite different meanings when compared and collidewith stylistic features from another or a combination of multiple. Look at the inside of the recent Doctor's Tardis for examples of Brocolage – the old typewriter with the modern viewer etc.

Self Reflexivity

Is the text aware that it is itself a constructed simulation or reproduction. In using intertextual references and creating hyper-reality does it play with the idea of this by making reference to itself as a simulation of reality?

Self Reflexivity

Is the text aware that it is itself a constructed simulation or reproduction. In using intertextual references and creating hyper-reality does it play with the idea of this by making reference to itself as a simulation of reality?

Parody & Pastiche

Post Modern texts use Intertextuality to reference existing texts, sometimes as an HOMAGE – paying tribute to its influence and sometimes as PARODY & PASTICHE invites the postmodern audience to make sense and meaning of the reference by its understanding and experience of consuming a bank of previous media, often for the purpose of comedy & humour.

HYPERREALITY

• Reality is no longer pure or truth – our culture is saturated by media simulations of reality that we can no longer seperate them. The blurring of real and ‘simulated’, especially in film and reality TV or celebrity magazines, Simulation or hyperreality can refer to not only the increasing use of CGI in films like Avatar, but also the narrative enigmas of The Matrix, Blade Runner or Inception.

'Is it human or artificial’?

SIMULACRA

• This has implications for realist forms of media, since our sense of reality is now said to be utterly dominated by popular media images; cultural forms can no longer 'hold up the mirror to reality', since reality itself is saturated by advertising, film, video games, and television images.

• Moreover the capacity of digital imaging makes 'truth claims' or the reliability of images tricky – think about the use of Photoshop in magazine and advertising images. Advertising no longer tries seriously to convince us of its products' real quality but, just shows us a fake about the product.

The Erosion of HistoryIn a society where a constant flow of images via mass media and mass communication becomes

part of everyday life, we are treated to an endless barrage of signs which we accept, not as being real, but, as Baudrillard would argue, as supplanting the real. The real loses its meaning, and what we believe and deal with are simulacra. Baudrillard would, as Jameson did, relate this idea to history. Without any grounding in the real, and having no way to prove the real, our knowledge of the past is confined to whatever symbols we associate with it when we attempt to portray it. For example, "The 80's," as an historical entity, is not anything real, but merely the amalgamation of the symbols that we have accumulated for it, whether they be images of stonewashed designer jeans, new wave pop, breakdancing, Ronald Reagan, Just Say No, glasnost, greed, or the Challenger. There is no history, only a distorted nostalgia, distorted because it relies only on the symbols, icons, and indexes that we have access to at any given moment.

Blurring of boundaries• The boundaries between form and structure of settings

in time and periods in history have been blurred so that they are set in a dislocated narrative space – no time and no place. Films such as Inglorious Basterds demonstrate the 'erosion of history'. In addition to this the boundaries of genre have been blurred to produce Hybridity.

Disjointed Narrative Structures

• These are said to mimic the uncertainties and relativism of postmodernity in films like Pulp Fiction as contemporary narratives often won’t guarantee identifications with characters, or the 'happy ending' or meta narratives which have traditionally been achieved at the end of films. They often manage only a play with multiple, or heavily ironic, perhaps 'unfinished' or even parodic endings, Similar to Memento and Fight Club . Narratives can also be disjointed in time and space – see modern / retro films like Blade Runner

Peer Micro Teach

10 mins to recap 5 terms with definition/examples

Become familiar with the terms – find your opposite

Rotate stationsExamples & DefinitionMake connection to the other areas5 mins all rotate

Put it all together

Connect them, what are the relationships between the terms

Summary• We usually think of the media as being 'in between' us

and reality, hence the word 'media' and the idea of 'mediation'

• Postmodernists claim that in a media-saturated world, where we are constantly immersed in media - on the move, at work, at home - the distinction between reality and the media representation of it becomes blurred or even entirely invisible to us. In other words, we no longer have any sense of the difference between real things and images of them, or real experiences and simulations of them. Media reality is the new reality.

Jamesons Nostalgia & Cultural Recycling

Using Intertextuality, Parody and PasticheCreate a new idea for a nostalgia-based media

text for your generation that recycles previous media texts either a Parody (Cheeky) or Pastiche (Homage)

How easy is this to do?Why – who is the post-modern generation that

Nostalgia works on?

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This becomes more complex but accessible when we consider the building of virtual worlds in games for example Liberty City in GTA, but also online our identity and relationships through memes & the projection of our selves into avatars, facebook, and Second Life

WHY IS THIS POSTMODERN?

Chicken Fight

FIGHT CLUB

NEXT MONDAYFight workshop Design a sequence that demonstrates some or

more of the postmodern stylistic approaches we have discussed here

Consider particularly how we planning this relies on us make sense of fighting as 'simulacra' & 'hyperreality'

Some starting points

Family Guy chicken fightKill BillRockyMatrixStreetFighter2TekkenMortal Kombat