Globalization I: Postmodernism

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Globalization I Postmodernism
1. Postmodernity Globalization 3. Reflexive
Postmodernism vs. Cultural Imperialism

• Postmodernism, Representation
• and History

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Outline

• Starting Questions Quiz
• 2-1 From Modernity to Postmodernity a Review
• Postmodern Culture
• 2-2 (Skip --David Harvey) Time-Space
  Compression
• 2-3 (J. Baudrillard) Simulation
• 2-4 (F. Jameson) Loss of Affect History
• 2-5 Next time Reflexive Postmodernism
• 2-6 Next time Globalization as Cultural
  Imperialism?

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Starting Questions a Quiz

• What is Postmodernity? And modernity?
• What are the characteristics of postmodernism?
• What are the examples of postmodernism that you
  know of?
• How do we analyze In Country as a postmodern
  film? And Forrest Gump?

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Postmodernism 2-1

• From Modernity to Postmodernity

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From Modernity to Postmodernity
Modernity Postmodernity
Fordism Post-Fordism
Organized capitalism Disorganized capitalism
Mechanical reproduction Electronic Reproduction
central and rational organization of manpower and capital Flexible accumulation of capital, sub-contracting
Standardization of production Flexible production of parts
Manufacturing industry Products as main commodity Service industry information as capital.
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From Modernity to Postmodernity (2)
Increasing emphasis on
Consumption, lifestyle ?
Consumer Society and Biopolitics Overall commodification, Reification and fragmentation of history human identity, Governing the whole population and its life through life style and reproduction
Image/Spectacle Society Dissociation of Commodities from their use value, Signs from their traditional meanings (or signifier from signified)
Compression of Time-Space (skip)
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Postmodernism A Summary

• Related Theorists and examples in class
• F. Jameson (nostalgia film, Forrest Gump In
  Country)
• L. Hutcheon (The Stunt Man and Cindy Sherman)
• 3. Hutcheon (Obasan, Ararat), and C. Jencks
  (?????)
• 4. F. Lyotard (internet publication via YouTube,
  Blog? ???)

• Features
• Depthlessness, pastiche, image and simulation,
  commodification
• metafictional (self-reflexive ??), ambiguous,
  eclectic ??
• boundary-crossing , pluralistic
• questioning meta-narrative, de-doxification?????/?
  ?

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Postmodernism 2-2

• Cultural/Economic Flows in Postmodern Time and
  Space

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Postmodern Time and Space

1. Separation of Time, Space and Place from each
   other -- thru
2. Disembeddedness of social relations and signs
   and re-embedding the re-definition of
   traditional signs/relations in a new context.

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Postmodern Time and Space (2)

• 3. Compression
• 1) The pace of production and communication get
  accelerated so that boundaries are broken and
  this world sometimes seems to collapse inwards
  upon us" (Harvey 240).
• "The central value system . . . is dematerialized
  and shifting, time horizons are collapsing, and
  it is hard to tell exactly what space we are in
  when it comes to assessing causes and effects,
  meanings or values" (Harvey 298). 
• "The interweaving of simulacra in daily life
  brings together different worlds (of commodities)
  in the same space and time.  But it does so in
  such a way as to conceal almost perfectly any
  trace of origin, of the labour processes that
  produced them, or of the social relations
  implicated in their production" (300)

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Cultural and Economic Flows Worldwide, but
uneven

1. Transcultural flows culture travels to us as
   signs and commodities
2. Spreading of Western culture and technologies
3. Disjunctive Flows multiple scape (scene e.g.
   landscape),. e.g. the disjunctive flows of
   ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes,
   mediascapes and ideoscapes
4. multiple cores, multiple semi-peripheries and
   peripheries.

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Postmodernism 2-3 Simulation

• What is simulation? And simulacrum?
• Is it possible to know the Real?
• Is postmodern representation completely
  self-referential (or non-representational).

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Simulation and the Hyperreal

• Denies the binarism of True/False,
  Reality/Fiction by introducing the third term
  the hyperreal (textbook 7 361)
• Hyperreality the only real is that which can be
  reproduced. the precession of simulacra (365)
• ? no text is original everything is simulation.
  Do you agree? Lets get some examples first.

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Simulation Fable

• A Borges tale the cartographers of the Empire
  draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly
  covering the territory
• with the decline of the Empire this map becomes
  frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still
  discernible in the deserts
• The shreds like Ozymandias status in Shelleys
  poem an aging double ends up being confused
  with the real thing

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Some of Baudrillards Examples

• A. the biological and scientific -- 1.
  simulation of symptoms 10. DNA model
  reproduction 11. Nuclear deterrence
• B. the religious -- 2. the simulacrum of
  divinity
• C. museumification of culture -- 3. the return of
  the Tasaday 4. the salvage of Rameses' mummy, 5.
  return of the parts of a Cloister to its origin
• D. popular culture -- 6. Disney 9. the filming
  of the Loud family in California (? Madonna)
• E. the political -- 7. Watergate 12. Vietnam
  war, Algerian war
• F. social crimes -- 8. all holdups, hijacks (?
  Face Change ????) 

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Textbook 366

• But what if God himself can be simulated, that
  is to say, reduced to signs which attest to his
  existence? Then the whole system becomes
  weightless it is no longer anything but a
  gigantic simulacrum not unreal, but a
  simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is
  real, but exchanging in itself, in an
  uninterrupted circuit without reference or
  circumference. -- religious icon ? God a copy
  of a copy?

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Representation and Simulation

• (textbook 385)
• These would be the successive phases of the
  image
• 1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.
• 2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.
• 3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.
• 4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever
  it is its own pure simulacrum.

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Representation and Simulationassumption of an
essential reality
Kates handout pp. 13-14
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Central Issue The Postmodern Debate
Positive (e.g. critical arts and social practices) Negative (e.g. media postmodernism, consumer culture)
De-centering (subversive of mainstream systems) Empowering the margins A-political, complicitous, intensifying its logic of overall commodification imperialistic
Anti-foundationalism, Pluralism Boundary-breaking Constructing subjectivity Parody Skepticism, Relativism, lack of critical distance Death of the subject (loss of affect) Loss of History Pastiche, kitsch
Textbook no point of reference, anything goes (p. 361)
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Critique of Postmodernism F. Jameson as an
Example (1) Loss of Affect

• Van Goghs peasant shoes

• Andy Warhols Diamond Dust Shoes

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Monroe by Andy Warhol
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Postmodernism 2-4 History

• Nostalgia Film

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F. Jamesons Critique (2) Loss of History

• Pastiche (??? blank parody--parody with no
  critical intent or centralpoint of reference)
  Eclipses Parody (critical of a norm)-- style
  becomes codes, reassembled playfully and without
  critical intent (e.g. Top Gun? Hot Shot, Moulin
  Rouge, Ferris Beulers Day Off ????, Date Movie)
  
• Nostalgia Film -- the past becomes a composite of
  stereotypes, spectacles no stars (with
  'personality' in the older sense)
• e.g. 1) historical films ??????? ?????
• e.g. 2) Postmodern pastiche or sci-fi Somewhere
  in Time, Back to Future, Blue Velvet, Wild at
  Heart, etc.)

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F. Jamesons Critique (2) Loss of History

• Nostalgia for the Present e.g. Time Out of
  Joint, Blue Velvet (see notes)
• Presents the 50s as a composition of images
  (e.g. Blue Velvet)
• the evil (e.g. Frank) the emptiest form of
  sheer Otherness (into which any type of social
  content can be poured at will). (textbook 404)
• No historical novel (of the 19th century type)
  anymore
• historical novel emergence of historicity
• nostalgia film its enfeeblement and repression
• Historicity defined a perception of the present
  as history that is, as a relationship to the
  present which somehow defamiliarizes it and
  allows us that distance from immediacy which is
  at length characterized as a historical
  perspective (textbook 399-40) ? cognitive map

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Postmodernism 2-5

• (Self-)Reflexive Postmodernism

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Reflexive Postmodernism (chap 6 pp. 152-)

• the figural over the discursive ?
  aestheticization of everyday life.
• ? The readers or consumers thus get their choices
  in the aesthetic combination/interpretation of
  signs.

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Postmodern Self-Reflexive Texts the other types

• Questioning Boundaries between reality and
  fiction
• Vanilla Sky Mulholland Drive
• The Purple Rose of Cairo, ?????, Stuntman
• Questioning Consumer Culture
• Icicle Thief
• Questioning History
• Ararat and ???
• Novels by ??????, etc. etc.

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Postmodernism 2-6

• Cultural Imperialism vs. Globalization

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Cultural Imperialism argument (textbook chap
5115- )

• --the dominance , worldwide, of a standardized,
  'homogenized' consumer culture, emanating from
  western (and particularly North American)
  capitalism, represents a form of global cultural
  regulation.
• Basic thesis certain dominant cultures threaten
  to overwhelm other more vulnerable ones.  e.g.
  America over Europe, "the West over the Rest,"
  the core over the periphery, capitalism over more
  or less everyone.

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Cultural Imperialism argument two major strands

• 1. "anti-Americanism"--against American cultural
  and  economic dominance, could be a form of
  cultural protectionism (e.g. the banning of
  importation or use of satellite dishes in Islamic
  states).
• Danger of protectionism or nationalism who are
  "we" that get represented in national culture?

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Cultural Imperialism argument two major strands

• 2. against transnational capitalism supported by
  communication systems--
• Examples of cultural domination Disney,
  Hollywood Film e.g. the film Evita,
  MacDonald's, Coca-Cola, Nikeand even Internet.
• Hides the facts of exploitation
• Liking them (esp. those cultural texts such as Mu
  Lan and Sex in the Cities), we absorb their
  ideologies, too.

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Cultural Imperialism argument Counter-Argument

• 1. not predominantly American culture
• The complex cross-cutting and overlay of
  communication paths and flows takes on a less
  benign aspect now it appears as a 'web' which
  enmeshes and binds all cultures. the dominant
  culture as "the 'distanciated' influences" which
  order our everyday lives b. imports operate at a
  'cultural discount'

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Cultural Imperialism argument Counter-Argument

• 2. Viewer reception the viewers may receive
  dominant culture differently. -- patterns of TV
  viewing--a. 'primetime' scheduled for local shows
  
• -- A research done of the viewer reception of
  Dallas (????) in Holland, which shows indeed a
  diversity of more localized responses.

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Cultural Imperialism argument Counter-Argument

• 3. the 'decentring' of capitalism from the West
  --against core-periphery argument This
  structuring of the global capitalist system
  assures the continued economic weakness, cultural
  subordination and conditions for the exploitation
  of the Third World by the First.  It does not
  adequately grasp the complexities of the
  operation of global capitalism.
• But how about the influences of Japan and Korea
  here?
• Multiple Cores and peripheries.

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Cultural Imperialism argument Counter-Argument

• Globalization is a global project
• Globalization is unlikely to produce an entirely
  regulated, homogenized global culture. A.
  'indegenization' of Western cultural goods,
  localization B. deterritorialization caused by
  the capital by the immigrants from Asia, Africa
  or Latin America

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References

• Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global
  Culture.Nationalism, globalization and
  modernity. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi
  Sage, pp. 31-55
• Frederic Jameson -- http//www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Lite
  rary_Criticism/postmodernism/jameson.htm

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Notes 1

• Philip K. Dick the author of stories based on
  which Blade Runner and Total Recall were made.
• ????(Potemkin village)??????????????????,?????????
  ????????????,????,???????????????????????????????

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Notes 2 Time Out of Joint

• The protagonist Ragle Gumm believes that he lives
  in the year 1959 in a quiet American suburbHis
  unusual profession consists of repeatedly winning
  the cash prize in a local newspaper competition
  called, "Where will the little green man be
  next?".
• Gumm's 1959 has some differences from ours the
  Tucker car is in production, and Uncle Tom's
  Cabin was recently written. As the novel opens,
  strange things begin to happen to Gumm. A
  soft-drink stand disappears, replaced by a small
  slip of paper with the words "Soft-Drink Stand"
  written on it. Pieces of our 1959 turn up an
  article on Marilyn Monroe (who didn't exist in
  their world), and radios (which had been
  abandoned at the dawn of television).
• Gumm actually lives in a then-future Earth (circa
  1998). (source Wikipedia)

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Note 3 Blue Velvet

• Opening scene images of the 50s
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vnM975_Ld9S0