Level 06

Already? Oh dear.

Task 4 - Hyperreality Research

An article discussing whether or not the TV series is a good representation of 'student life' - http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/oct/06/fresh-meat-close-student-life

Simulation - aims to copy reality
Simulacra - copies reality
Hyperreal - copies of copies of copies of copies. reality fades and copies become real

Task 4 - Hyperreality

An example that I believe to be a form of hyperreality is the images which are presented to represent 'student life'. A number of TV series, including Skins, Fresh Meat, and Hollyoaks all present themselves to be the simulation of student life; aiming to copy reality. They present what is believed to be the 'typical' student life, with students drinking, partying and generally having a good time with not so much actual studying going on. Fresh Meat is a prime example of this.

The series focus' on 6 students which are all starting their first year at University and have landed living in the same house together. Granted that you don't know who you may end up living with which makes this aspect of the show the simulacra, but the show took it upon themselves to present to the audience 6 completely different individuals that would potentially attend University.

In reality, they wouldn't form the sort of friendship that they do throughout the series, but they do present behaviour that overtime has become the hyperreal aspect of the lifestyle. This includes not engaging with the course in which they have chosen to study and not doing any of the work to a suitable level in order to achieve a pass but are still passing. Drinking excessive amounts of alcohol on any chosen day in which they please regardless of whether they are required to be in University. Sleeping with any random person they have met in a bar and being careless about the consequences. Flirting with the tutor in order to obtain a higher level of achievement with the course which is being studied. Eating any food which they can get their hands on and producing 'new' meals which they have come up with, which is basically just using up what ever food it is that they have left. Being generally lazy, and many more examples throughout.

By these TV shows presenting these images to a younger audience, they are lead to believe that this is what it would be like to move away from home and attend University, approaching the real world of being a student through an image of the real world of being a student. Only to later be disappointed with the actual reality of it, and ending up with a whole lot of work and studying to actually be doing, and in thousands of pounds worth of debt.

Task 3 - Essay Proposal

Essay title:
'Would advertising strategies work without its reflection to Panopticism's form of discipline?'

Points of the essay:

• An overview into Panopticism
• An overview into advertising strategies
• Compare advertising strategies to Panopticism's theory of working
• A detailed look into two advertisements within the same brand
• Compare what the brand has chosen to do and compare this to Panopticism

Literature Search:

Online

• 2007. Advertising Media Planning and Strategy. [online] Available at <http://www.admedia.org/>
• 2009. Marketing Communication Plan. [online] Available at: <http://ivythesis.typepad.com/term_paper_topics/2009/12/marketing-communication-plan-lynx-deordrant.html>
• Foucault, M, 2001. Michael Foucault: Panopticism. [online] Available at: <http://www.cartome.org/foucault.html> 
• Thelynxeffect, 2010. Lynx Getting Dressed ad. [video online] Available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A4aFfW0bl>
• Thelynxeffect, 2010. New tv ad for Lynx Twist - the fragrance that changes [video online] Available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDISjpOVuaE&feature=relmfu
• Wikipedia, 2011. Panopticism. [online] Available at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism>

Not Online

• Caples, J, 1997. The Advertising Methods Fifth Edition. United States: Prentice Hall.
• Farbey, A D, 1998. How to produce successful advertising. London: Kogan Page Limited.
• Heller, S, 2000. Sex Appeal. New York: Allworth Press.
• Scott, W D, 2009. The Theory of Advertising: A Simple Exposition of the principles of Psychology. Milton Keynes: Lighting Source UK Ltd.

Task 2 - Benjamin & Mechanical Reproduction Research

Quotes from the essay to potentially use:

• Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
• The which whitters in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.
• We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.
• Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses towards art.
• The spectators process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change.
• Quantity has been transmitted into quality.
• Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situation which would be out of reach for the original itself.

Task 2 - Benjamin & Mechanical Reproduction

"Read the Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. Write a 300 word analysis of one work of Graphic Design, that you think relates to the themes of the text, and employing quotes, concepts and terminology from the text."

The 'keep calm and carry on' poster is a perfect example of work where the 'quantity has been transmitted into quality'. Originally produced as a propaganda poster back in 1938 during WWII, it has now transformed from being available to a purposely selected target audience to now being available for the masses, causing the 'aura of the work of art' to whiter. Since the original poster was recently rediscovered, the reproduction of it has caused the poster to loose 'its presence in time and space', changing 'the reaction of the masses towards it'. It is no longer seen as a poster devised to keep the public calm during any immediate crisis and boost morals during the war, but as a sudden trend amongst the masses. This has caused 'the spectators process of association in view of these images' to be 'interupted by their constant, sudden change'. Not only has this poster been reproduced across a variety of different media stepping away from the original poster format, but has also been recreated numerous times by altering the second section of the quote to fit any given situation. Examples of this include 'keep calm and call batman', 'keep calm and put the kettle on' and 'keep calm and drink beer'.

 

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

Task 1 - Panopticism

Essay - Reworked

Would advertising strategies work without its reflection to Panopticism's form of discipline?

Following Jeremy Bentham’s creation of a Panopticon: an institutional building that allows ‘an observer to observe all inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched’ (Wikipedia, 2012, online), philosopher Michel Foucault built on the ‘conceptualization’ of it as he elaborated ‘upon the function of disciplinary mechanisms in the prison and illustrates the function of discipline as an apparatus of power’ (Wikipedia, 2011, online).

…”The architecture incorporates a tower central to a circular building that is divided into cells, each cell extending the entire thickness of the building to allow inner and outer windows. The occupants of the cells are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls, and subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an observer in the tower who remains unseen. Towards this end, Bentham envisioned not only venetian blinds on the tower observation ports but also maze-like connections among tower rooms to avoid glints of light of noise that might betray the presence of an observer”... (Barton, 1993, p138).

The development of this allowed the ideal mechanism of gaining power and control, allowing society to realize that there are better ways of controlling people – mentally rather than physically. Just from the knowledge that a person may or may not be being watched has a peculiar effect by internalizing the individual, making them behave in the way that they believe they should when they are being watched all of the time, even when they aren’t. Over time this resulted in people accepting that they are always being watched, therefore making them begin to control themselves, turning into docile bodies in the terms that they won’t repel – keeping themselves disciplined.

The form of mental control which emerged from this era can be reflected within a lot of what we are used to today that we most likely take for granted. Within advertising, the strategies in which an advertising team would fulfill in order to produce a successful advertising campaign reflects similarities to how Panopticism works.

The role of an advertising team is to project an image that will convince the consumer, both existing and new, that they ‘need’ the product that is being advertised, even if in fact owning it would be unnecessary. In order to produce an effective advertising campaign, they must first get to know their customers and understand their needs.

…”Ordinarily the business man does not realize that he means psychology when he says that he ‘must know his customers’ wants’ – what will catch their attention, what will impress them and lead them to buy, etc”… (Scott, 2009, p2&3).

This role that is created for the team behind any advertising campaign is similar to the role of the guards within the central tower of the Panopticon, where they observe the consumer just like the guards observe the individuals within the cells - monitoring their every move and generating a general understanding within the way that they think. This then enables them to play on this and manipulate it in order to generate interest towards what is being advertised.

…”Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men’s behaviors; knowledge follow the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised”… (Heller, 2000, p41).

Upon observing the consumers, the advertising team obtains knowledge that they later build on and translate into a unique selling point within an advertising campaign that will prove to be effective. ‘There is no element in an advertisement more important than the appeal – the reason you give the reader for buying’ (Caples, 1997, p73). In order to do this, the team recognizes the general aspects within the consumers’ lives, and project an image of a life that is somewhat superior to theirs which then generates a desire to have this life. This leaves the life they’re already living feeling belittled and not as good as it could be, and suggests that they could in fact vastly improve it by the one small gesture which is being recommended to them – to buy this product.

The consumer reflects the role of the individuals that were kept within the cells of the Panopticon that are monitored. ‘He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication’ (Foucault, 2001, online). Although the lives of the consumers are closely monitored and analyzed in order to appeal to them, the information that is actually discovered is never then used as a unique selling point within an advertisement. This is because what is being projected is a ‘better’ version of the consumers’ life of what it could become once this product is owned – to show them what they could have. In order for the advertisement to be effective, the advertising team must identify where the consumers’ deepest desires lay and then play on this, essentially offering it to them on a plate through the consumption of this product.

An example of a brand that grasps this concept exceptionally well is the men’s deodorant Lynx, with them now being ‘one of the largest consumer-goods companies in the world’ (Marketing Communication Plan, 2009, online) after being launched in 1983. They are targeted towards boys and young men who are forever becoming more conscious about their ‘sex appeal’ and how they are perceived by the opposite sex.

…”Lynx is Britain’s best selling men’s deodorant. The Lever Fabergé- owned brand targets young men in their late teens and early twenties. A central plank of the brand’s marketing strategy is the annual launch of new variants”… (Marketing Communication Plan, 2009, online)

Before the re-launch of Lynx under a ‘new brand strategy which encapsulated in the endline ‘The Lynx Effect’’, they previously ‘had revolved around the concept of attraction’ (Marketing Communication Plan, 2009, online) which had worked well until during the nineties, when the brand began to loose its edge.

…”A new strategy was proposed that refocused its target market and identified a common truth: those young guys are preoccupied with the opposite sex, but often lack the confidence to do anything about it. The new campaign portrayed women finding Lynx users irresistible”… (Marketing Communication Plan, 2009, online)

Lynx understands that the importance of carefully planned communication marketing in achieving these ends can not be underestimated’ and their objectives ‘are to create sustainable brand awareness among the existing and potential customers’ (Marketing Communication Plan, 2009, online). As a result of Lynx’s close monitoring of it’s target market, it has allowed them, as did the Panopticon, to analyze and constantly review the behavior and needs of the subject, and ensure that their desires are being somewhat fulfilled without leaving them completely satisfied, ultimately causing them to want more and know what they will want next. Without this close monitoring and understanding, Lynx may not have fully grasped as well and effectively as they have that;

…”Men are increasingly concerned with their image and the image of their products is equally important…A growing number of men are said to be especially image-conscious and are particularly interested in the approval of their peers. Though deodorants are a staple item, men’s interest in grooming and physical appearance creates opportunities to target them with products that specifically address their issue, whether they are tangible, like alluring fragrances, or more ephemeral, like the projection of image through brand identification”… (Marketing Communication Plan, 2009, online)

An example of this is the ‘Getting Dresses’ Lynx Effect advert, where the opening of it begins with a very good-looking couple laying in bed together, before getting up and putting their clothes on. At first you see them put their underwear on, and then as they are putting other things on such as their trousers and t-shirts, you see them going on a journey which goes from a house, down lots of different busy streets, into a supermarket which then leads to two half filled shopping trolleys facing opposite directions. This promotes the image that just by wearing Lynx, no matter where he is or what he is doing he will be completely irresistible to females and they just wont be able to keep their hands off him.

By the girl in the video being really good looking, maybe even perfect in some men’s eyes thanks to the constant images of women which are presented within the media suggesting that only this type of beauty is what should be admired, suggests that not only will the male become irresistible, but also that he could be picky with which girl he would ‘choose’ to let be all over him and ultimately sleep with him. The male in the advert also represents what is classed ae the ‘perfect’ male, with his chiseled facial features and highly toned body – this suggests that even if in reality you don’t look like this, once the Lynx is applied, you will immediately gain confidence and appear like this in the eyes of any girl you wish to have.

Another good example is the advert for Lynx Twist ‘the fragrance that changes’. Consisting of a different angle to the previous example, this advert focuses in more on the fact that men don’t always know what it is that is going on in a woman’s mind, or what it is she actually wants, and suggests that by wearing this particular type of Lynx, it will do all of the hard work for them and they can just sit back.

The video begins with an average looking male with messy hair and a beard trying to impress a good looking blonde woman, but the expression on her face suggests that she is bored. Then, just as it looks like the male is about to give up, a machine appears which alters his appearance to now suit  the woman’s new mood, giving him a hair cut and a shave – suggesting that this is what the smell of the deodorant will do – make the woman see the male differently to what she has been doing and not just loose interest. This happens again as the couple more on to a different location and the woman is bored once again, changing the males appearance to now suit the new mood of the woman giving him a more stylish haircut and trendy clothes.

What the advert is suggesting to its targeted consumer is that it’s ok for them not to understand what it is a woman is thinking as the changing fragrance of this particular deodorant will be able to alone keep her more than interested, meaning the male can just sit back effortlessly and still have her weak at the knees.

Although both of these Lynx adverts have different agendas, they both still link back to what they have learnt from understanding their target market by ensuring a promise to the male that by wearing this product, he will have no trouble with the opposite sex. It will make them oozing with a confidence that they wouldn’t be able to achieve otherwise, and will make them more appealing without having to do anything about it despite the fact that they are becoming more image-conscious.

As well as this, over the years since Lynx began, they have built up a trust between themselves and their customers which will ultimately keep them coming back. By producing this trust, it has been one of the key features within gaining precious knowledge in which they require when approaching any new advertising strategy that they will start working on next.

…”Another way to build trust is to create a powerful promise for the customer. For example, some companies make money by selling the next generation of their product to replace older, broken ones.”… (Mycoskie, 2011, p139).

In conclusion, the way in which Panopticism works as a form of discipline is reflected within the process of advertising theories as these use the same sort of principles where it is the way in which someone thinks and what they believe is what is being manipulated in order to make products more appealing to them. By closely observing their target market, this allows a generating and projecting an idea of a ‘more perfect’ life to the consumer than what they have, and making them believe that this is what they need in order to be happy. Without this, advertising wouldn’t work as effectively as it does to generate sales because there wouldn’t be a constant need within each individual to better what we already have.

Bibliography


2007. Advertising Media Planning and Strategy. [online] Available at <http://www.admedia.org/> [Accessed 20th January 2012].

2009. Marketing Communication Plan. [online] Available at: <http://ivythesis.typepad.com/term_paper_topics/2009/12/marketing-communication-plan-lynx-deordrant.html> [Accessed 20th January 2012].


Barton, B F and Barton, M S, 1993. Modes of Power in Technical and Professional Visuals. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 7.1.

Caples, J, 1997. The Advertising Methods Fifth Edition. United States: Prentice Hall.

Farbey, A D, 1998. How to produce successful advertising. London: Kogan Page Limited.

Foucault, M, 2001. Michael Foucault: Panopticism. [online] Available at: <http://www.cartome.org/foucault.html> [Accessed 15th January 2012].

Heller, S, 2000. Sex Appeal. New York: Allworth Press.


Mycoskie, B, 2011. Start Something That Matters. New York: Spiegel &Grau.

Scott, W D, 2009. The Theory of Advertising: A Simple Exposition of the principles of Psychology. Milton Keynes: Lighting Source UK Ltd.

Thelynxeffect, 2010. Lynx Getting Dressed ad. [video online] Available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A4aFfW0bl> [Accessed 21st January 2012].

Thelynxeffect, 2010. New tv ad for Lynx Twist - the fragrance that changes [video online] Available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDISjpOVuaE&feature=relmfu> [Accessed 21st January 2012].

Wikipedia, 2011. Panopticism. [online] Available at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism> [Accessed 15th January 2012].

Wikipedia, 2012. Panopticon. [online] Available at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon> [Accessed 13th March 2012].
 

Lecture 12 - Globalisation, Sustainability & The Media

Here are my notes from the twelth lecture Globalisation, Sustainability & The Media on 01/03/2011.

Definitiions of Globalisation

• socialist - The process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces.
  
• capitalist - The elimination of state-enforced restrictions on exchanges across borders and the increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange that has emerged as a result
  

The dominance of one culture over other cultures all over the world.

McDonaldization
‘American sociologist George Ritzer coined the term “McDonaldization” to describe the wide- ranging sociocultural processes by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world’

Marshall McLuhan
'Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have exended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned'

• tv allows us to see further, radio allows us to hear further
• we can now hear and see events on a global scale

Global Village Thesis

‘As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed at bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibilty to an intense degree’

• people being in communication together would bring us all together, have more responsible on our actions
• but this hasn't happened!

We can now see images of soldier cluster bombing villages. Media has desensitised us. 

The Internet

New technological age is extended to involve the whole of man kind. - definitely not happened.

We're moving further away from a unified culture.

It's causing a split rather than a unification. 

Three problems of Globalisation

• sovereignty - challenges to the idea of the nation-state
• accountability - transitional forces and organsations: who controls them?
• identify - who are we? nation, group, community

Cultural Imperialism

If the global village is run with a certain set of values then it would not be so much an integrated community as an assimilated one.

Key thinkers -

• Schiller
• Chomsky

Rigging the 'free market'

• media conglomerates operates as oligopolies

Oligopolies divide the world into sections depending on how much money they can make.

The whole free market is rigged around the interest of capitol. 

US media power can be thought of as a new form of imperialism

• Local cultures destroyed in this process and new forms of cultural dependency shaped, mirroring old school colonialism.
• Schiller- dominance of US driven commercial media forces US model of broadcasting onto the rest of world but also inculcates US style consumerism in societies that can ill afford it!

Propaganda Model - 5 Basic filters

• ownership
• funding
• sourcing
• flak
• anti communist ideology

Ownership

Rupert Murdoch, selected media interests

• News of the World / The Sun on Sunday
• The Sun
• The Sunday Times
• The Times
• NY Post
• BSkyB
• Fox TV

Sourcing

The news is only as good as the events that you're allowed to record. If a reporter goes to a press conference with Obama and starts to pester him, then that person would just be banned from ever interviewing him again.

Number 10 - ever actually see inside the building, only see the face of what they want us to see.

Most media organisations are funded by advertising.

Flak

US-based Global Climate Coalition (GCC)

• comprising fossil fuel and automobile companies such as Exxon, Texaco and Ford. The GCC was started up by Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest public relations companies, to rubbish the credibility of climate scientists and 'scare stories' about global warming.
• flak is characterisedby concerted and intentional efforts to manage public information

Anti- Ideologies

Sustainability

• ‘sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’

Sustainable development, sustainable growth, and sustainable use have been used interchangeably, as if their meanings were the same. They are not. Sustainable growth is a contradiction in terms: nothing physical can grow indefinitely. Sustainable use, is only applicable to renewable resources. Sustainable development is used in this context to mean: improving the quality of human life whilst living within the carrying capacity of the ecosystems.


Greenwashing

Sustainability, a sustainable system is impossible under a capitalist model.

'Most things are not designed for the needs of the people but for the needs of 'the manufacturers to sell to people'

Lecture 11 - The Production and Critique of Institutions

Here are my notes from the eleventh lecture The Production and Critique of Institutions on 23/02/2012.

Lecture 10 - Deleuze and Guattari and Creativity

Here are my notes from the tenth lecture Deleuze and Guattari and Creativity on 09/02/2012.

Slide One – Session aims
− You were listening to the music of Richard Pinhas. A composer who attended many of Gilles Deleuze's seminars in the late 1960s, and was greatly influenced by many of his ideas. The music is a series of continually oscillating motifs formed by the interactions of individual sounds that momentarily cohere with one another, before dissipating, and reconfiguring in changed form.
− Aim – To examine how Deleuze and Guattari draw emphasis to the constructed and contingent nature of social reality.
− Objectives (1) To contrast models of creative, “rhizomatic” thought with traditional “tree-like” models of thought based in sequential argumentation; (2) To examine Deleuze and Guattari's interpretations of processes of social change and development; (3) To consider how they propose individual people might transform themselves; (4) To contextualise these theories of change and development in relation to the concepts “the virtual” and “the actual”.

− Deleuze and Guattari were a philosopher and psychiatrist who worked together in France in the 1970s and 1980s, and who have been hugely influential in numerous fields, including (but not restricted to) art practice, theories of music, geography and sociology.
Slide Two – May 1968 riots
− Their collaboration developed against the backdrop of the student and worker protests in Paris in May 1968. This attempt to directly challenge the French state, and the eventual crackdown by the authorities, led to a widespread re-assessment of the role of the activist in society, a task that Deleuze and Guattari undertook in two books Anti-Oedipus (1972), and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
Slide Three – A Thousand Plateaus
− Our focus today will fall on the second book, A Thousand Plateaus. In this text, they examine and reconfigure the notion of a concept.
Slide Four - Trees
− Their project was envisaged as a revolt against traditional modes of thought, which they identify with a “tree-like” structure. Deleuze and Guattari identify this 'tree-like' image of thought, where one line of argument must sequentially lead to another, branching out in a structured manner, with thinkers such as Kant and Hegel, whose ideas, such as the sovereign subject of thought, universally valid reason, and the moral good, continue to shape contemporary social life.
− Against this dominant tradition Deleuze and Guattari conceived of an alternate structure for thought that privileges difference, play and creativity.
− They called this rhizomatic thought.
− We're going to look at A Thousand Plateaus, and the concepts developed within it: the rhizome, assemblage, subjectivation, schizo-analysis, the body without organs, and the virtual and the actual.
− Each chapter (or, as they put it, plateau, meaning a particular set of circumstances brought together in an intensive relationship) resists reduction to a goal-oriented argument. Instead multi-disciplinary practices are brought into a state of play, and concepts are re-contextualised and reverberate together.
− Our task today will be to navigate these plateaus by drawing out and examining the configurations of thought developed within them.


Rhizome
Slide Five – Rhizomes
− A rhizome is an underground stem that grows horizontally and pushes up lateral shoots - like the ginger plant. For Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome forms an alternative model of thought to the tree-like structure that they associate with traditional philosophy.
− Here, claims are no longer linked in a continuous vertical progression towards a conclusion; rather, they are linked through leaps of association and the relation of seemingly unconnected ideas.
− Deleuze and Guattari emphasise that concepts “are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies. […] They must be invented, fabricated, or rather created”. The concept, they affirm, is not an abstract isolated entity but a principle of interrelationship. Each one contains “bits or components” that come from other concepts, but also links up with these others in a state of mutual support, co-ordination and articulation.
Slide Six – Saussaure Diagram
− This understanding of the concept can be grounded if we refer back to Ferdinand de Saussure's conception of the signified.
− This is the mental concept that Saussure considered to be an arbitrary construct, produced only through agreement between users of a given language system.
− Thus, in Saussure's reading, the concepts that we use in thought and speech gain their meanings purely from a repeated pattern of contextual usage between different language users. Individual words, such as dog, gain their meanings through agreements between people that this word and no others refers to a particular furry mammal that barks and wags its tail.
− Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizome draws upon the arbitrary and constructed and interconnected nature by which meaning is constructed, according to Sausurre's semiotic theory. Thus the rhizome builds relationships between objects, places, people and ideas, generating unanticipated commonalities between seemingly disparate entities. Rhizomes are inherently creative and may be produced intentionally or unintentionally.
− Likewise, if we look back to Nietzsche, we can see how he contrasts the cool abstractions of rational man with the heat and intensity of intuitive man. Intuitive man pursues the primal character of his immersion-in-the-world and embraces contingency, irregularity, intensity, strangeness, experimentation.
− For Deleuze and Guattari these become creative forces that shape new rhizomatic configurations. Such configurations dissolve conventional procedures and thought patterns, reconnecting them as contingent, diverse, formations.
Slide Seven – Isa Genzken
− We might consider Isa Genzken's sculptures as rhizomatic artworks. Her works reflect the chaos of the urban landscape, yet often read as small scale skyscrapers. In these works, objects, images and poured paint collide, creating formations that suggest future architectural production shaped in relation to the city's own detritus. Materials, images and ideas drawn from diverse sources collide, suggesting possibilities for the transformation of urban space.

Assemblage
− How do conventional meanings and practices become fixed? In order to address this question, Deleuze and Guattari developed the notion of the assemblage.
− Their usage derives from the French agencement, the meaning of which emphasises processes of arranging, organising and fitting together. Assemblages emphasise the convergence of heterogeneous elements such as food, furniture, and people in recognisable structures, such as a dinner party.
− An example of an assemblage with which we are all familiar is the place we make our home. A home is a way in which we make a space express comfort to us. Deleuze and Guattari describe a child, alone and afraid in the dark. The child hums or sings a tune as a way of bringing familiarity to the place.
− J. Macgregor Wise notes “...one need not be fixed in one's dwelling to create a home: a home might be an airline seat, a stroll in the neighbourhood, a car for daily commuting, or a space on the lawn for a picnic. Home is thus not a pre-existing space; it is not [necessarily] in the house”.
− Beyond our personal habituation of our environment, Deleuze and Guattari also consider how language orders corporeal situations.
− They directly link contexts and language. On their understanding, the literal meanings of words are always accompanied by assumptions of value, power and authority.
Slide Eight – High School Diploma
− For example, the principal of a school says “here is your diploma”. Pre-supposed in this statement is a relation of power between the principal and student, as the bestower and the receiver of knowledge. This also implies a debt to be repaid by the student – society has devoted a lot of time and resources to you: now go get a job.
− The principal's speech at the same event will undoubtedly hammer home the presuppositions of duty, and the right to enter the world of work. Brian Massumi considers the ramifications such presuppositions. “Every word is laden with the implicit presupposition of what one says-thinks-does in such a circumstance”.
− Oswald Ducrot examined this dimension of power within social agreements. He emphasised the role of words like “I” and “you”, which shift back and forth between people in conversation. They also serve as a form of identification in performative utterances; statements that enact their meaning, such as when a speaker announces “I do” at the moment of marriage.
− Consider this work Good Boy, Bad Boy by the artist Bruce Nauman.
Play Good Boy, Bad Boy
− The work features a man and a woman who face you, the viewer. They repeat statements that continually change through the substitution of individual words. These statements begin with variations between “I”, “you”, “we”, “they”, placing the viewer in a disorienting set of changing roles between individual accuser, and accused, and member or condemner of a particular social grouping.
− With reference to terms, such as 'you' and 'I' Ducrot argued that language is not just about the transmission of messages; it also places the interlocutor under an obligation to reply. Thus simple language use imposes a role upon the language user, and forces them to accept the presuppositions of value, power, and even prejudice within the language system.
Slide Nine – Hoodies
− Consider how the term “hoodie” has come in modern British society to signify both a person wearing a hooded sweater with the hood up, and also a particular criminal identity. Now consider how you or, perhaps a policeman, or another authority figure might judge a person wearing their hood up to be “up to no good”. Here they are employing the pre-suppositions of the language system.
− So, assemblages of all kinds operate, and they operate within a territory. And territory is not simply a place, it's also a process.
− A congregation of kids in hooded sweaters might occupy the trolley park outside a supermarket. They form an assemblage of bodies that is coded in relation to a series of judgements by passers-by. The may be read as a gang, just a bunch of kids entertaining themselves however they can. One might assume they are waiting for a friend, or plotting how to buy alcohol, or perhaps they are planning criminal activity. They make the security guard nervous, a passing family keeps its distance, the police, in the hope of controlling them, engage them in dialogue. They are physical. They emit a force. They de-territorialise the trolley park. It is no longer a banal storage area, it is re-territorialised as a space of social interaction, banter, potential danger. The kids have appropriated this space, subtracting it from the supermarket territory, which remains an assemblage of products, displays, checkouts, parking space, special offers, sedentary consumption and surveillance.
− This process of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation might continue nightly. Its status in the eyes of those who pass the trolley park might also change in relation to de-territorialisations within more collective assemblages: media reporting, community policing, propaganda and rioting might all cause a change in how these people are judged.
− De-territorialisations and re-territorialisations occur within assemblages in accordance with the flows in which their component parts move at different speeds. Different social constructions change at different rates. The status of teenagers in society, for instance, can change very quickly, while the status of the military is very embedded and static and slow to change. This effects how assemblages form and shift.
Slide Ten – Zaha Hadid
− The architect Zaha Hadid is interested in expressing such assemblages through archtiectural form. The National Museum of XXI Century Arts, in Rome was designed by Zaha Hadid as an assemblage. The structure of the building is conceived in relation to the spatial flows that structure the district of Rome, which the architect deterritorialises into architectural forms.

Subjectivation
− People are caught up in these developments. They are brought into the fray through Ducrot's shifters, I and you. “Hey you, what are you doing there?”
− Deleuze and Guattari go further, though. As individual bodies are buffeted around these social assemblages - from school, to home life, to church, and to work, and in a continual immersion in social activity - reading other people's approval or disapproval, being gendered, by selecting interests and passions or having them prescribed by others - a subject is produced.
− This is the process of subjectivation. This is how Deleuze and Guattari consider that you and I were constructed. Constantin V. Boundas notes “The Deleuzian subject is an assemblage of heterogeneous elements […] Deleuze insists that subjectivity is not given; it is always under construction.”
− The subject's recognition of itself is an after-effect. Society produces subjects. As we have already seen the word “I” is empty, and can only be appropriated, yet is used by each individual as a means of self-reference – “I suffer, I walk, I breathe, I feel”
− Deleuze and Gauttari also draw upon Louis Althusser's notion of ideological state apparatuses to develop their analysis of subjectivation. T.J. Clark defines ideology as “those systems of beliefs, images, values and techniques of representation by which particular social classes, in conflict with one another, attempt to ‘naturalise’ their own special place in history.
− Ideology shapes how we view ourselves and our place in the world. Multiple ideologies circulate within any given society at any given time, yet some are able to dominate as they reflect dominant class interests. In effect the people who own he means of production get to shout loudest.
− For Althusser, social institutions such as the church, schools, the family, the legal system, the political system, the trade unions, the media and the arts reproduce a plethora of ideological formations, which serve to maintain the state in its existing form, by reflecting the ideology of the ruling class.
− Althusser identifies such institutions as ideological state apparatuses, which serve to re-produce and re-enforce dominant ideologies. 'All ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production [...] but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to their relations of production”. Such apparatuses form the material contexts, such as schools or churches, that integrate individuals into a range of social practices that are conducive to maintaining existing class relations. One might consider how the protestant church might teach virtue of work to a proletarian worker.
− In Deleuze and Guattari's reading, these ideological state apparatuses serve to reproduce the presuppositions of language that code material contexts and the roles of individuals within them.
− As people navigate these different contexts they are led to take on different identities that are deemed appropriate to them, and they adjust themselves to what is deemed acceptable to their roles within these places.
Slide Eleven – Commuter
− Consider the working day. One is shocked out of dream fantasies by the alarm clock, jostled into the role of commuter, thrust into the tasks of wage labour, and then, back at home, required to perform as a parent, and finally show the sensitivity of a lover. All this in one day. Each different situation makes a series of unique demands upon the individual, to which they must conform, at the risk of castigation.

Schizo-analysis
− Whilst Deleuze and Guattari set out this model for the social construction of identity, they also try to create a practical means by which individuals might reconfigure their own subjectivities.
− In their collaboration the authors were able to draw upon Guattari's psychiatric practice at the radical clinic La Borde.
Slide Twelve – La Borde
− The objective of the clinic was not to cure the mentally sick, but to encourage the individual to participate in their own self-creation.
− Schizo-analysis questioned the dominant modes of interpretation that shaped Freudian psychoanalysis, emphasising the relations of power between analyst and analysand.
− For Freud, parental relationships shape an infant's emerging psyche, and the dominant role of the father serves as an external prohibition (curtailing the child's desire to possess their mother) under which the infantile libido is definitively shaped.
− This narrative functions as a core conceptual construct within Freudian psychoanalysis, explaining the mediation of unconscious desire by the super-ego. This theory forms a tree-like model that guides the analyst's interpretation and treatment of patients.
− Deleuze and Guattari note “[psychoanalysis] is not only a theory but [is] also [a] practice of calculation and treatment. Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this regard: it bases its own dictatorial power upon a dictatorial conception of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis 's margin of manoeuvrability is therefore very limited. In both psychoanalysis and its object there is always a general, always a leader (General Freud). ”
− Here is a set of pre-determined conceptions of the unconscious, desire and power that restrict the process of analysis and shape conclusions. The particularities of each patient's life is subsumed under the generalities of psychoanalytic theory, which is mediated by the authority figure of Freud.
− Schizo-analysis and Guattari's work at La Borde aimed to remove such models and to re-negotiate the role of the analyst. The functional, productive space of the kitchen replaced the analyst's couch, and, in collaboration, patient and analyst would create roles throughout the day. This process would generate a number of situations that implicate “the care-givers as much as the patients. They [would] concern a whole gamut of activities through which the patients express themselves, which we as care givers make possible […] and which contribute to a diverse nuclei of subjectification” .
− Schizophrenia came to exemplify a willingness to embrace alternatives that drove this process. In traditional psychology schizophrenia is framed in entirely negative terms as a form of fragmentation within the ego that generates a sense of disassociation, and detachment from reality.
− For Deleuze and Guattari, the debilitating fragmentation of the schizophrenic's connection with the world is a quelled attempt to engage it in new ways.
− They attempted to draw a distinction between schizophrenia as a clinical entity (breakdown), and schizophrenia as a process, that is, as a breach or an opening that breaks the continuity of the ego, carrying it off on an intense and terrifying voyage.
− The instability wrought by this illness indicated to these thinkers the possibility that thought and action could simultaneously accommodate multiple standpoints, leading to the development of a methodology that they termed schizo-analysis.
− Against the psycho-analytic model, schizo-analysis “treats the unconscious as an acentred [productive] system […] The issue is never to reduce the unconscious or to interpret it or to make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to produce the unconscious, and with it, new statements and different desires.”
− Schizo-analysis repudiates the notion of self as a fixed entity. It emphasises instead the social construction of identity, and seeks to generate activities in which set patterns of self identification can be de-stabilised, thus creating the possibility for their re-construction.

Body without organs
Slide Thirteen – Antonin Artaud
− The concept of the body without organs describes a radical reduction of the bodily awareness down to an unordered state.
− The term was initially developed by the playwright Antonin Artaud in the 1920s, whose “Theatre of Cruelty” was designed not to represent man, but to create a movement within the being of the participants and audience.
− This movement depended upon a breakdown of identity. The body is here experienced as a field of sensation. Deleuze notes “It is an intense and intensive body. It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the variations in its amplitude. […] Sensation exceeds the bounds of the organic”.
Slide Fourteen – Francis Bacon
− In a book devoted to the Irish painter Francis Bacon Deleuze describes the painter's attempt to capture the fact of the sitter before him. Deleuze describes this as a recourse to ‘flesh and nerve; a wave flows through it and traces levels [of sensation] upon it’. This wave is captured by the flow of oil paint across the canvas that renders the sitter as a continuum of mobilised flesh, tensing and flexing against pressures within its environment.
− How does one attain this state? A whole chapter of A Thousand Plateaus is devoted to making yourself a body without organs. Possibilities range from sado-masochism, meditation, and Taoist sex. The authors note, “Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, and [and] thinking with your brain. Why not walk on your head […] see through your skin, breathe through your belly. […] When psychoanalysis says “stop, find yourself again”, we should say instead, “Let's go still further, we haven't found our body without organs yet”.
− The point here is to create a process that allows one to break away or de-territorialise from fixed identities, unmasking their arbitrary and culturally determined natures, and to then re-territorialise within new forms of identity.

Virtual / Actual
− Construction and contingency are key themes in the thoughts of Deleuze and Guattari. In their eyes, what a gang of children signifies, how the principal of your school shaped your attitude to work, and whatever comfort means to you, could all have been different.
− This is because all these examples depend upon a shifting array of social formations caught in a perpetual process of mutual development. Nothing is inevitable. Everything changes.
− Think, for example, of how the signification of the term 'banker' has changed in recent years in relation to press revelations about reckless lending and enormous bonuses.
− The only certainty for Deleuze and Guattari is difference, and they consider the western tradition of thought to be falsely pre-occupied with identity. The forms of identity to which they refer might be what we understand to be the real world, “the realm of things that exist independently of our ways of thinking about them”, or the way we prioritise our subjectivity and see this as the basis of our experience.
− Here we can see the recurrence of the idea of 'reality' that Baudrillard felt was corroded by the simulacrum. Difference for Deleuze and Guattari precedes identity, and they consider that what we think are 'real' solid objects, and unchanging identities, are mutable and transitory.
Slide Fifteen – Mont Sant Victoire
− Within Deleuze and Guattari's project, everything, even a mountain, must be considered a construction, and every component of that construction is made up of other smaller components.
− What they term the molar form (the protrusion of the singular rock formation against the landscape), is also comprised of molecular constituents (the layers of particles within the stone, the tectonic forces that slowly drive through each fibre of the mountain).
− We should also consider the manner in which the presence of such a real object is ascertained. James Williams notes “a mountain exists as real with all the ways it has been painted, sensed, written about and walked over.” This traditional notion of 'the real', where something is real as opposed to something imaginary, or copied, no longer holds. Every object we understand in relation to its brute materiality is only ever known from a given perspective.
Slide Sixteen - Cezanne's late paintings of Mont Sainte-victoire
− This point is exemplified in Cezanne's late paintings of Mont Sainte-victoire, which seek to capture, in Gottfried-Boehm's analysis a “synthesis of change and permanence.” This thousand metre limestone ridge was rendered in Cezanne's paintings in relation to the dynamics of his own act of perception.
− The paintings not only captured the monumental structure of the mountain, but also brought attention to how the artist's own perception of it was ordered, i.e. how he perceived depth, how he located objects in visual sensations, and how he related a central visual focus to objects in the periphery of his visual field.
− Thus, as any object is a contingent construction, an assemblage of molecular units and forces that can only be experienced or shown from a given perspective, if we are to retain the notion of real it must be radically re-conceptualised.
− Deleuze and Guattari afford us this opportunity with their contrast of the virtual and actual. Constantin V. Boundas notes “the virtual and the actual are two mutually exclusive, yet jointly sufficient, characterisations of the real.” The actual refers to states of affairs, bodies, and individuals, whilst the virtual refers to what these entities imply, and what in fact brings them into existence. Brian Massumi explains “For a statement or thought to appear in all its apparent clarity, its complicated genesis must recede into the shadows from whence it came. The virtual is the unsaid of the statement, the unthought of the thought.”
Slide Seventeen – Francis Bacon's Studio
− Let us return to the studio of the artist Francis Bacon. The floor of this work space was awash with photographs, of celebrities, wild animals, military leaders, images of diseased bodies, old master paintings, press photographs, and stills from films. Along with the photographs he worked from of the people featured in the paintings, these images served mental triggers that suggested characteristics that might emerge within the painting process.
− Like all the implied meanings that accompany the literal meanings of order words, lending them the capacity to re-establish relations of power between people, these images are the subtext of Bacon's apprehension of the sitter. They are all the layers of visual association that shaped Bacon's perception of the person before him. Thus the photographs exist as virtual layers of significance that shape the actual recognition of the person before the artist.

Conclusion
− Between creative rhizomatic constructions, social assemblages, individual re-programming, and questioning accepted notions of thought, Deleuze and Guattari developed a series of tools for strategic thought and action. These provide a set of tools for those who wish to challenge order that exists for its own sake, and a way of understanding how we today exist in relation to an ever changing, and ever more complicated modern world.

Lecture 8 - Jean Baudrillard and Postmodernism

Here are my notes from the eighth lecture Jean Baudrillard and Postmodernism on 26/01/2012.

Aim - To examine and contextualise Jean Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality.

Objectives: (1) To foreground Baudrillard's position, by showing how it develops out of a Marxist critique of capitalism; (2) To examine how Baudrillard's analysis of advertising led him to argue that a consumer's engagements with commodities had begun function like a language; (3) To explore how Baudrillard extended this analysis into a fully blown theory of postmodernism.

− I'm giving three lectures as part of the Contextual studies course this term. Our topic today is the Jean Baudrillard's vision of hyper-real postmodern society, and the crisis that he feels the abundance of advertising, retail display, and televisual imagery, has generated in the fabric of social reality.
− This will be followed on the 9th February by a lecture on Gilles Deleuze and Felxi Guattari, who deal with similar issues of reproduction and mediation, but see potential for the creation of new forms of social life within these processes.
− Then, on the 23th February we will draw together these analyses to examine how artists and designers, deal with issues of social change in their work, by focusing on the issue of institutionality.
− Throughout the late 1960s Jean Baudillard examined how the increased productive capacity of western nations in the post war era, and the rise of corresponding industries of marketing and advertising transformed the structure of consumer experience.
− Baudrillard argued in texts such as The System of Objects (1968) that with the rise of consumer society, promotion and advertising began to take on a primary role in determining the commodity's value, and the consumer's disposition towards it.
− In the 1970 and 1980s in texts such as The Mirror of Production (1973), and Simulacra and Simulations (1981) he integrated the rise of the mass media into this analysis, and developed the argument that our engagement with material reality had now been superseded by a system of representations that saturate our perceptions.
− As Harrison and Wood note Baudrillard's “Critique of the political economy of the sign turned into a thesis that reality itself, as something separable from signs of it, had vanished in the information saturated, media dominated world” .
− This was Baudrillard's version of postmodernism; a hyper-real world where what we call reality was in fact grounded in simulacra.
− In Baudrillard's analysis simulacra have no natural link with a pre-existing reality. One can determine if an image is a simulacra, if one cannot identify a pre-existing concrete reality which that image can be understood to copy.
− For Baudrillard simulacra became the dominant form of image production in postmodern society.
− This idea was explored in films such as Bladerunner (1982), and grasped the popular imagination in the 1999 with the film the Matrix. The Matrix is a dystopian story about a young man Neo who starts to question the reality of the world he inhabits, and with the help of a gang of renegades, led by a character called Morphious, he leaves the matrix and fights the machines that created it. In this scene Morphious takes Neo back into the Matrix to explain its history and how it is able to function so effectively.
Play Matrix – “What is real extended clip” “Welcome to the Real
− In the Matrix reality has been reduced to a blank white expanse, which is filled with constructed images. Here we can start to have a sense of what Baudrillard means by simulacra. They are pure constructions and refer to no reality outside of themselves, and on mass serve to corrode any sense of a tangible reality.
− Thus, in Baudrillard's analysis the postmodern consumer's sense of the world around them is generated by the manner in which they are continually bombarded by simulacra.
− Baudrillard's theories can appear outlandish to some, and I want to demonstrate how the conclusions that he drew in the 1980s developed out of a Marxist critique of capitalism and towards a fully fledged postmodern theory.
− Baudrillard's early writings were grounded in Marxism. The dynamic development of our practical involvement with the world forms the basis of Marx's thought, and the investigation of how this involvement developed in the postwar period shaped the focus of Baudrillard's investigations.
Slide One – 18th Century German Harvest
− For Marx our involvement with the world occurs through 'labour', a concept which encompasses both how we shape our environment through our industry, and how our own experiences are rooted within and conditioned by our environment. In Capital Marx defines labour as “the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature imposed condition of human experience”.
− Thus within this Marxist framework man's relationship with his environment determines the character of his consciousness.
− For Marx a determining factor in this relation is man's own productive capacity and his relationship with the products of his labour.
− Marx considers that man's industry generates products, “external objects” that are useful, as they “satisfy human needs” . The usefulness of the physical properties of a product makes its use value.
− However, as soon as conditions arise where different products can be exchanged for one another they become commodities.
− Commodities are possessed of an exchange value, a quantitative relation of equivalence that allows one commodity to be exchanged for another.
− One commodity has many exchange values, as its ratio of equivalence is realised through its exchange for varying quantities of other commodities. In their equality they are both equitable to a third thing, a universal equivalent, money.
− The exchange relation is expressed through the abstraction of use value. In the exchange relation one use value is only worth as much as another, to which it is deemed to be equivalent.
Slide Two – 19th Century Factory.
− Under capitalism the worker's labour becomes a commodity that he or she must sell in order to live. This separates the worker from the products of his labour and makes them alien to him. Marx notes “The externalisation of the worker in his product means not only that his work becomes an object, an external existence, but also that it exists outside of him, independently, alien, an autonomous power, opposed to him.”
− Thus in summary: (1) when people produce goods for the market, the value of those goods is not set by their usefulness, but by their ability to be exchanged for other things; (2) the labour embodied in these goods is valued not for its usefulness, but for its ability to generate exchange; (3) people's labour also becomes a commodity, to be bought and sold for a wage.
− Marx notes that as soon as a simple object, such as a table “becomes a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to start dancing of its own free will”.
− The transformation of production and consumption Baudrillard theorised can be rooted in the rationalisation of capitalist production proposed as early as F. W. Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), which advocated the breakdown of each labour process into a series of requisite actions, and organising production around work tasks based in time and motion study.
Slide Three - Henry Ford, Assembly Line
− Such an approach informed the development of Henry Ford's automated car assembly line in Michigan in 1913. Ford separated the production process into a series of individual tasks allotted to individual labourers. Each worker fashioned or attached a particular part of the car in a synchronised production process that involved the cooperation of multiple workers, who each contributed to the production of individual cars as they travelled down the production line.
− Ford's five-dollar, eight hour day was only envisaged in part as a way of securing the discipline that working in a highly productive car assembly line required. It was also meant to give workers sufficient income and leisure time to consume the products of mass production.
− Slide Four – Volkswagon factory Wolfsburg
− The form of mass commodity production initiated by Ford was brought into maturity in the advanced capitalist countries in the post war period period, and generated a boom that lasted until the early 1970s.
Slide Five – Billboards in a 1970s American city centre.
− In the post war period this massive expansion in productive capacity needed to be met with a corresponding rise in demand, and as factories continually produced large quantities of the same commodities, this demand needed to be made consistent.
− Thus a corresponding industry developed; publicity and advertising. During this period advertisements became a ubiquitous phenomenon, colonising both urban space, and home life.
− Individual competing adverts would sit alongside one another, or be broadcast in a sequence, yet they acted on the consumer as a system.
− John Berger notes, “Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal. Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, this car and that car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal. It proposes that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more”.
− Judith Williamson develops this point considering how advertisements seek to address consumer desires, and aspirations, rather than showing how the products they promote might be useful to us. “Advertisements have to translate statements from the world of things, for example, that a car will do so many miles per gallon, into a form that means something in terms of people. Suppose that the car did a high mpg: this could be translated in terms of thriftiness, the user being a clever saver, in other words being a particular type of person. Or, if the mpg was low, the ad could appeal to the 'above money pettiness', daredevil kind of a person who is too trendy to be economising. Both statements in question could be made on the purely factual level of use value by the simple figures of 50mpg, and 20mpg. The advertisement translates these thing statements to us as human statements; they are given a humanly symbolic exchange value.”
− Thus in Williamson's analysis commodities are made equitable to desires or aspirations, and through our continual immersion within advertising, the language of publicity becomes a way in which we comprehend how we might find fulfilment.
Slide Six – 1957 - Miller High Life advert. “For the taste of your life “go first class” with Miller High Life.
− In his 1968 Essay The System of Objects, Baudrillard examined the ramifications of the rise of marketing outlined by Williamson. Baudrillard's claimed that advertising codes products in a way that determines the consumer's relationship with them.
− Poster notes, “advertising codes products through symbols that differentiate them from other products, thereby fitting the object into a series. The object has its effect when it is consumed by transferring its “meaning” to the individual consumer”.
− Baudrillard draws emphasis to the motivational research of Ernest Dichter, noting how he used focus groups to encourage consumers to divulge their emotional relationships with products, providing advertisers with information that they could then shape their advertising campaigns around.
Madmen clip – “Focus Group on madmen” 20 seconds to 3:20 mins (interview room observation room)
− Dichter notes “one of the fundamental tasks of all advertising is to permit the consumer to freely enjoy life, and to confirm his right to surround himself with products that enrich his existence and make him happy”.
− Staging a focus group became a common aspect of planning advertising campaigns in the post-war period. In response to the findings of the focus group adverts were then specifically designed to match products with particular desires or fears.
− As a continual presence throughout urban space and within the home, advertisements served to generate associations between consumer needs and products.
− Thus in this context the point of sale is re-formulated. The consumers sense of the product's usefullness is superseded by a set of codified emotional connections generated by advertising prompts. Baudrillard notes “the act of buying is neither a lived nor a free form of exchange. It is preconditioned activity where two irreducible systems and confront one another […] this is the forced integration of the system of needs with the system of products”. Further to this such a codification of needs is necessary as mass production requires constant demand for consumer goods if it is to be sustained.
Slide Seven – 1970 Dodge Challenger Convertible “Our plum crazy Challenger R/T is no shrinking violet”
− For Baudrillard this array of advertising messages takes on the character of a language. This is made evident with the example of a car, “it is not the concrete structure of the auto mobile engine that is expressed, but rather the, form, colour, shape, the accessories, and the “social standing” of the object”. He goes on, “Needs disappear into products which have a greater degree of coherence. Parcelled out and discontinuous, needs are inserted arbitrarily and with difficulty into the matrix of objects”. This then is the work of advertising, to cohere desires to commodities.
Slide Eight – 1970s Storefront
− In his essay of 1970 Consumer Society Baudrillard relates this earlier analysis to the layout of store-front displays and the interior layout of department stores.
Slide Nine –Meat Counter in a 1960s Woolworth's foodhall
− “Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods and clothing, are like a primary landscape of affluence. […] by purchasing a portion one in effect appropriates the whole crumbling pyramid of oysters, meats, pears, or canned asparagus”.
− The consumer desire for abundance finds representation in the halls of department store, which are are made to signify surplus, affluence and feasting. Products are arranged in stacks, displays or collections that the consumer distinguishes from each other in terms of the needs, desires or fantasies that embody for them.
− For Baudrillard “The display window, the advertisement, the manufacturer, and the brand name here play an essential role in imposing a coherent and collective vision”.
− Baudrillard understands that products arranged such a manner take on a similar character to that of the linguistic sign in the analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure.
Slide Ten – Saussure Diagram
− Saussure examined the status of signs as part of a wider language structure. He considered that linguistic signs were made up of two parts. A sound made by the vocal chords when speaking, or the graphic marks that comprise a word.
− Inseparable from the signifier in any sign and indeed, engendered by it, is what Saussure called the signified.
− This is the mental concept. Saussure considered that the linguistic sign is an arbitrary construct, produced purely through agreement between users of a given language system.
− We can see this by looking at how the same objects are named by different words in different languages.
− For example in France the word for dog is “chien”, and in Germany “hund”. The only reason that the signifier does entail the signified is because there is a conventional relationship at play.
− Saussure considered that a sign signifies by virtue of its difference from other signs. Saussure called this system of differences between signs “langue”, which he differentiated from individual speech acts “parole”.
Slide Eleven – Supergiant Supermarket 1960s.
− Similarly, Baudrillard argues that one cannot comprehend the nature of the consumer's psychological attachments with the commodity if it is considered directly. Rather, one must consider how these attachments converge as a system of signs, which like Saussure's notion of collective signification “langue” are structured by relations of difference. One can see this process in a commercial break on television where adverts converge arbitrarily, and in the distribution of different adverts on billboards throughout the city.
− In Baudrillard's argument continual consumer exposure to these campaigns and the presentation of commodities within retail environments themselves, constitutes a system of signification that constructs consumer desire.
− The Mirror of Production (1973) marks Baudrillard's break with Marxism. He argues throughout that core Marxist notions such as labour and use value are in fact mirror images of capitalism that are only comprehensible in relation to it.
− He argues first that the very idea of use value is produced through relations of exchange. “The presupposition of use value – the hypothesis of a concrete value beyond the abstraction of exchange value, a human purpose of the commodity in the moment of its direct utility for a subject – is only the effect of the system of exchange value, a concept produced and developed by it”. Thus Marx's notions of use value and unalienated labour, are re-conceived here as mere fantasies constructed from within our experiences of wage labour and commodity production.
− “The use value of labour power does not exist any more than the use value of products or the autonomy of signified and referent. The same fiction reigns in three orders of production, consumption and signification”.
Slide Twelve – Time Square in the 1980s
− From here Baudrillard then developed a fully blown theory of postmodernism. These later writings examine the relationship between images and reality, and consider relevance of the concept of the simulacrum to discussions of contemporary life.
− These later texts place emphasis upon the way in which experience has become saturated by media imagery. Within these circumstances representation, which we traditionally think of as following reality, as an image of it, in fact begins to shape the way in which we interpret reality itself.
− Baudrillard argues that such simulacra, do not have any referent or ground in reality, and that our cultural condition becomes one of “hyperreality”. In hyperreality images of take on lives of their own and become templates for new realities.
− Simulacra colonise reality overtaking it, and shaping the manner in which we interpret and respond to our environment. Baudrillard considers that these simulacra form into a code that extracts meanings from concrete social relations, and redeploys them within the media.
− In his essay Simulacra and Simulations (1981) Baudrillard cites the example of Borges's story of an empire whose cartographers create a map which exactly replicates and covers the whole territory. Once the empire falls into decline the map becomes ruined, leaving shreds and tatters distributed throughout a desert. Baudrillard considers this to be a “fine allegory of simulation”.
− Slide Thirteen – Frontierland at Disneyland, 1955
− He also considers Disneyland to be a prime example of such a hyper-real landscape. “Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of the simulation. […] It is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world etc. He argues that the overtly fantastical environment within the park serves to distract attention from the equally vacuous reality outside it, first encountered in the solitude of the massive car parks that surround the theme park.
Slide Fourteen – The Twin Towers
− Baudrillard also considered that the Twin Towers stood as an architectural sign of how a concrete social life was being superseded by a code that was free of reference to any reality outside itself. The two towers, whose mute structures replicated one another, ignored the architectural bustle an competition that surrounded them. They existed as one for the other, immune to their surroundings, as a closed series of two.
Slide Fifteen - 9/11 2001
− Indeed, the terrorist attack that finally destroyed these Towers can be seen as an example of how the media representations can shape concrete social events. Weren't the spectacular explosions of 9/11, strangely reminiscent of the explosive finales of many Hollywood action films.
− Baudrillard considers that examples such as these are indications of how social events themselves are now shaped through the influence of simulacra generated by media culture. Baudrillard notes “all hold ups, all hijacks and the like are as it were simulation hold ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media”.
Slide Sixteen – Blair Election 1997
− In Baudrillard's analysis simulacra also invade political policy. Wants, desires, and beliefs forged by the propaganda and advertising, are recorded in opinion polls, which are closely monitored by politicians, and inform the policy decisions.
− This vision of hyper-real society formulates Baudrillard's sense of postmodernism, which for him is an era in which progress has come to a standstill. Bertans notes “Baudrillard's relentless dystopic vision of late modernity, as he saw it in the seventies, or postmodernity as he has come to see it, leaves no exits”
− Baudrillard himself states “postmodernity […] is a game with the vestiges of what has been destroyed. This is why we are “post” - history has stopped, one is in a kind of post history, which is without any meaning”.
American Psycho clip - Intro to Patrick Bateman
− We might consider Patrick Bateman, the main character in Bret Eastan Ellis's American Psycho as an example of the kind of personality that hyperreal society might create. His values are almost entirely constructed through marketing, and he exists in a world of fantasies where his desire to be the envy of others turns into murderous rage.
− In summary, Jean Baudrillard's theory of postmodernism developed out of a Marxist critique of capitalist production, focused upon how, in the postwar period, the rise of the advertising industry served to shape and regulate consumer demand, in ways that could meet the increased productive capacity created by the rationalisation of industrial production.
− He extended this analysis by focusing on how advertisements, and retail environments formed into a language, which continually re-iterated the same prospect of happiness and fulfilment through consumption.
− Then, in the 1980s his focus shifted onto how the proposals made by advertisements and the growing media culture influenced decision making, the construction of social space, and even political policy, ultimately arguing that this replication of social reality brought history to a standstill.

Lecture 9 - Censorship and 'Truth'

Here are my notes from the ninth lecture Censorship and 'Truth' on 02/02/2012.

Overview

• notions of censorship an truth
• the indexical qualities of photography in rendering truth
• photographic manipulation and the documentation of truth
• censorship in advertising 
• censorship in art and photography

Indexical qualities of photography - captures a scene that is going on. 

Camera never lies - actually it can.

With analogue photography, there are the negatives which are the original. In digital photography is code that sits there and exists - image doesn't actually exist, it's just a code.

More truth in analogue photography than digital.

Manipulation is not true.

'Fove years before coming to power in the 1917 October revolution, the Soviets established the newspaper Pravada...'

What is actually published to us isn't actually the truth. Political agenda is only publishing you to see what they want you to believe is the truth.

The internet masks exposure to the internet in order to expose things that aren't necessarily real to the masses through the internet.

GQ magazine cover

Kate Winslet on cover of GQ magazine, with elongated photoshop - does it really make any difference to us?

Photo journalists 

Is it a real image? Does it really matter if it is?

'At the time (world War II), I fervently believe just about everthing I was exposed to in school and in the media. For example...'

Does a photograph stand up in it's own right?

Persuasion - 'a deliberate and successful attempt by one person to get another person by appeals o reason to freely accept beliefs, attitude...'

'Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation id no longer that of a territory...'

Does colour add more of a sense of real life in photos as opposed to black and white imagery.

Censorship

'Everybody everywhere wants to modify, transform, embellish, enrich and reconstruct the world around him - to introduce...'

To sell you a life that you wish to have.

'Suppose that a picture of a young woman inserting a chocolate bar into her mouth makes one person think of fellatio, but someone else says that this meaning says more about the observer than it does the picture...' 

Where do we stand with it? Is it left to the viewers thought.

Highly sexualised and porogative history of the imagers late 60s - early 80s.

 Cook, G. (1992) The Discourse of Advertising, London...

Amy Adler - The Folly of Defining 'Serious' Art

• professor of law at NY Uni
• 'an irreconcilable conflict between legal riles and artistic practice'

The Miller Test, 1973

Asks 3 quesions

Obscenity Law

' I think that the pictures are incredibly innocent and totally unsexual.  don't crop them, I don't retouch them and the shots are never staged. I might introduce an element like a mask, to a given situation, but I would never insist that the child put it on.'

Final Thought

Just how much shuld we believe the truth represented in the media?

Should we be protected from it?

Is the manipulation of the truth fair game in a capitalist consumer society?

Should art sit outside of censorship laws exercised in other disciplines?

Who should be protected, artist, viewer, or subject?

Lecture 7 - Identity

Here are my notes from the seventh lecture Identity on 19/01/2012.

Historical conceptions on Identity
Discourse methodology
Critique contemporary practice within these frameworks
Idea of liquid identity

Theories of Identity
Modernity - industrial revolution
Facial characteristics

Postmodern theorists disagree with it

Phrenology - splits the mind into sections

image of head


Notion that different parts of the brain formulated the person that you are
If one part is large then it will mean another side is lacking

Cesare Lombroso - says that it's genetically inherited - suggests if someone looks a certain way is more likely to commit crime than others

You can study and measure someones facial characteristics to see how intelligent you are.

Blonde haired blue eyed beast

Physiognomy legitimising racism
Harper's Weekly

image of lots of people
Hieronymous Bosch - Christ carrying the Cross

painting of black person
Chris Ofili - Holy Virgin Mary
Part of sensation exhibition in 1997.

Historical hases of Identity
Douglas Kellner - Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern, 1992

Pre modern identity - personal identity is stable - defined by long standing roles
Modern Identity - modern societies begin to offer a wider range of social roles. Possibility to start 'choosing' your identity, rather than simply being born into it. People start to worry about who they are
Post-Modern Identity - accepts a fragmented 'self'.

Pre-Modern Identity
Institutions determined identity - marriage - mans owning of the wife, church, monarchy, government, the state, work

Secure identities
Farm worker - report to rich people
Soldies - reports to the state
Factory worker - related to industrial
Housewife
Gentlemen
Husband-Wife

Modern Identity
Charles Baudelaire - The painter of modern life 1863
Thorstein Veblen - Theory of the leisure class 1899 - theory of the leisure class that doesn't have to go to work. Conspicuous consumption - relates to fashion. If you wear a certain type of dress it shows that you don't have to go to work, shows have money. To see and be seen.
Georg Simmel - The metropolis and mental life 1903 - Establishment of modern city and relates a note of social anxiety, concern of who you are and how you fit into society.

Modern Identity 19th & 20th Centuries
Baudlelaire - introduces concept of the 'flaneur' (gentleman stroller). People going about their leisure, being out and about and showing they don't need to go to work.
Veblen - conspicuous consumprion

Simmel introduces trickle down theory - upperclass seen wearing newest fashion and gear and then the lower class aspires to be like them and emulate what they are wearing. Upperclass want to distinguish themselves from the lower class, don't want to be linked. Emulaton, distinction, the 'mask' of fashion - people hide behind what they're wearing.

Georg Simmel
quote from slide titled his name


He suggests that with the speed and mutability, individuals start to draw into themselves to find peace. Become less concerned what is going on around them and more of what is going on inside.

Foucault
Identity is constructed out of the discourses culturally available to us.
What is discourse?
quote on this page


Possible discourses
Age, class, gender, etc...

Discourses to be considered
Class, nationality, race/ethnicity/gender and sexuality - 'otherness'

Class
Being with the industrial revolution, people moving to cities and working in factories became the working class. To recognise your own class you must acknowledge other classes.
If you are upperclass you want to maintain this distinction.

Mass observation - observing people, upper class people observing lower classes

bauman quote


Las Vagas
Sums up the fluid identity of the world. Different identities all pushed into one place.

quote about disney world


Sums up the notion of why go anywhere around you.

Race/ethnicity
Chris Ofili
images
No woman no cry - comes from the Bob Marley song - obviously.

Captain Shit - how he believes a black superhero would be perceived by a white audience. Is it a statement he is making on his race and identity with these?

Gender & Sexuality
Masquerade and the mask of the femininity

Postmodern condition
Identoty is constructed through our socialPo experience
Ervin Goffman The Presentation of self in every day life

Zygmunt Bauman
Identity 2004
Liquid Modernity
Liquid Love

quote & image


The Morality of Advertising - Theodore Levitt 1970
quote


Portmodern Identity
I shop therefore I am

Darley (2000), Visual Digital Culture, p.187
quote