Contemporary Problems, Response to Chapter 10

2011.NOV.25

Chapter 10, The Global Flow of Visual Culture

Many ways to respond to globalization, as well but I will focus on one of my favorite authors: about the same time as cultural and other theorists were writing about postmodernism (see response to Ch. 8), Terry Eagleton returns to a key theme of modernist political theory, ideology

Terry Eagleton, Ideology, An Introduction (Verso, 1991)

Reject the concept of ideology, as if we are free of collective interests that determine and direct us?

Postmodern rejects representation, skeptical of any real knowledge, sees power arising everywhere

Idea of “ideology” is said to be closed, old school, too deterministic (it looks at how we are structured)

But to lose concept of ideology while remaining driven by ideas is to fight ourselves,

       as one does in psychoanalysis: the self at war with itself, a very postmodern condition

Ideology, range of meanings: any guiding ideas, or just the false ones? Necessary to all, or specific to just some misguided souls? Is ideology enabling or dominating?

Often seen as false, source of blindness, distortion, and error; but all thought requires pre-conceptions

Technocratic society wants to deny any bias, as though its power is scientific, inevitable, objective

Foucault’s concept of ideology too broad: power and ideology found in every gesture, practice, habit

Language, technology, institutions all tools, specific to some forms of power, 

not the source of oppression

Source of religion, for example, not just power or domination: it may be false but not absurd,

       responds to real needs, pain, fear, alienation, lack of identity in fluid, changing world

Ideologies often obviously false: one people are inferior, e.g., or capitalism always brings democracy

But sometimes ideology can be based on factual things, but interpreted and used deceptively

Like advertising: no lies in a cigarette ad that shows cowboys smoking, but clear implication is false:

       cigarettes don't make you manly, they make you sick or dead

Problem: facts can be confirmed, but values cannot

Is there a basis for deciding between fundamentally conflicting values, or is it all relative?

Louis Althusser’s concept of ideology: not true or false, merely our lived relationship to situation

Ideas may be warped, but are necessary, natural, and unconscious, come from our real circumstances

Ideologies pragmatic (they get things done) and constitutive (they shape and determine our actions)

But are they really natural, neutral? Surely in a society of real freedom, there would be no ideology

There would be “nothing to explain away,” (28), no reason for complex narratives and illusions

Ideology is more than everyday practices, and not all are equal: the colour of a country’s mailboxes

       not as powerful, profound, or important as the size of its army

Six broad definitions of ideology (in order of rising specificity, power, and domination):

       All general ideas or beliefs held in common

       Ideas of any group or class

       Ideas used to promote and legitimate a group’s collective interests

       Ideas of the dominant group

       Distorted ideas used to defend the dominant group’s interests

       The distortion and deception inherent and systemic in any unequal, material social structure

The last suggests that ideologies arise from historical and material circumstances; so can they be

       changed simply through changing ideas?

Or does society have to change? Or do they change each other?

Is it crude and simplistic to see ideology as a product of economic compulsions, a systematic distortion that keeps wages low, or prevents workers from running their own workplaces collectively

Jürgen Habermas: rational, technocratic, pragmatic, instrumental ideas replacing rational “public values”

Places capitalism beyond ideology? Society run on basis of pure utility, technical solutions, not values

We become “exchange-value” only, no subjectivity to work on: “capitalism flattens the human subject to a viewing eye and devouring stomach.” (38)   

But complex, modern production requires independent, creative thought: can’t all be ironic machines

Summarizes other theories of ideology: it is all around, in the air we breathe, but is it immutable?

• Frankfurt School (Adorno, Marcuse), single, monolithic, deceptive, identical, reified culture

Reified = abstract ideas made concrete, embodied, frozen in material relationships

       (usually not for the best)

• Raymond Williams: varieties of social experience, local cultures, allows resistance:

       no hegemony is absolute, there are many “structures of feeling,” paths to action

• Michel Foucault, power is absolute, rises from a micro-physics, like sap in our veins

       (but then how to explain critical thinking? How to explain Foucault himself?) 

Important link: all ideologies must appear (be made to seem) natural, inevitable, universal, eternal

Althusser again: “ideology has no outside,” each one seems infinite (58)

But surely some interests really are universal? Equality, women’s liberation, e.g.

Only truth can survive being truly self-aware; ideology cannot understand itself to be ideological,

       or it ceases to work as, or to be, ideology

Our ideologies must be based on who we really are, or we must reject them

Eagleton then traces a broad swath of intellectual and political history, from the Enlightenment to Marx and the Second International (1914); through Lukács and Gramsci; to Adorno and Bourdieu

Chapter 7 is key for design: “Discourse and Ideology,” how words and other signs give us concepts

Tracing power through how we use language, prefer to imagine ‘deep meaning, closed systems;

       we want to imagine that the visual is a reliable language, when it is open and contingent

Our social position does imbue us with interests and specific ideas, like a galley slave vs. its master

Situation doesn't determine everything about the slave’s thoughts, but surely constrains it

And a slave’s thoughts surely represent that situation, the class position of slavery, if imperfectly

Do people become conservative from simply voting Tory? Or do they have real property to defend?  

For a detailed and challenging book on this same theme, but read through the philosophy of art and culture, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthtetic (Blackwell, 1990).

Contemporary Problems, Response to Chapter 8

2011.NOV.25

Chapter 8, Postmodernism, Indie Media and Popular Culture

Many ways to look at Postmodernism; it was much more than a style that came ‘after the modern’

Exhaustion of the modern energy; an end to its confidence in progress; loss of self-critique as

       any guarantee of its truth or progressive nature

In fact, today, postmodernism isn't even a central concept: as if we have lost the focus and ability

       to even doubt the modern, a permissive, infinite flat plain of possibility

Has the market simply absorbed everything, the sole justification for whatever we do,

leaving no room for critique and opposition?

 (Only a disorganized Occupy movement without even demands?)

But it’s worth looking at the question still, of what overall is the role of culture (and design) today, starting with modernism itself:

Tony Pinkney, “Modernism and Cultural Theory,” Introduction to Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (Verso, 1989)

Raymond Williams, studies many aspects of culture, indeed establishes ‘cultural studies’ as a field

Sees modernization and modernism (the art of modern societies) as “acceleration,” true of Wordsworth (English Romantic poet, 1770 – 1850) as it is of post-structuralist French philosophers today

Modernism the accelerated culture of a mass industrial society, serving the capitalist class it arises with?

By the 1950s, it was, in Williams’s words, a kind of “glossy futurism,” (9) a highly efficient and

       effective form of mass communication, perfect for corporate needs

Postmodernism continues the role of modernism, de-familiarizing, questioning, but in a popular idiom

Using irony and imagery from mass culture, not an oppositional avant-garde of difficult, negative works

Or is postmodernism just what it appears, an endless play of forms, without choices or distinctions

Once again perfect for corporate needs, but now on a truly global, mass scale?

Williams argues against postmodernism, as a newly dominant and misleading ideology

In “When was Modernism” he suggests 1880 – 1950; the late 19^th Century crucial for media innovation:

       photography, cinema, magazines, radio, recordings, etc.

Just as World War One (incidentally) produced income tax, propaganda, passports and

       workers’ revolution throughout Europe (but especially in Russia)

Modern art movements an incidental product of these energies and technologies; modern forms

       easily absorbed back into global capitalism: marketing and innovating in “heartless formulae” (35).

So, perhaps postmodernism is not too far removed from modernism, a continuation of it

Shares same problem: how to understand culture (let alone oppositional culture) in a world

       so completely dominated by private ownership of production, global markets, and the profit motive

No doubt many people (like me) first became aware of postmodernism in this collection of essays:

Hal Foster, Ed., The Anti-Aesthetic, Essay on Postmodern Culture (Bay Press, 1983)

Foster argues “the project of modernism is now deeply problematic.” (ix)

Modernism successful, but absorbed: became dominant culture, its jarring innovations new norm

Modern exploration of specific demands of a medium (painting is the prime example), now becomes

       about “cultural terms,” ideas that cross boundaries of discipline and media

We explore the idea of the sublime, or push issues representation, across high and low art,

       mixing popular and avant-garde culture, re-using and re-writing them like so many texts

Positions within a wildly plural field defined by politics, “affiliations,” interests

Play of the economic on culture not repressed, but celebrated, explored, to play with

Both “a postmodernism of resistance and a postmodernism of reaction”: take apart the dominant

       paradigm of high modernism; or just use history to rehash the past and leave things as they are

To be critical, postmodern practice cannot just return to old forms, in quote and pastiche

Foster insists on a critical distance, “a critique of origins, not a return to them.”

But: I think the proliferation of so many critical approaches—like the many topics and chapters in

       Practices of Looking—no longer have a meaningful way to engage, or to conflict with each other

In modern practice, certain works were validated as “genius,” most was rejected as kitsch or trash

But if everything is equally interesting, useful, worthy of study, and representative of some specific

       culture, how are we to decide which way to move, what is progress, and what to do next?

There must be a material basis from which all art and design arise, it must represent something more than stylistic or personal preference

Modernism pushed against the academic and stale culture based on Renaissance standards,

       which had become a parody of itself, badly in need of radical vision and artistic revolution

How are we to push against a culture that can buy and sell anything? Not whom do we work for,

       but what are we working against?

Other key writers in this very 1980s debate on postmodernism, many of whom happen to come from a Marxist perspective, seeing history as based in material interests, and the struggle between classes:

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke, 1991)

100 year old modernism exhausted; popular forms, not difficult ones, become central:

       pulp fictions, Las Vegas architecture, ‘B’ movies, gothic and science fiction, etc.    

Postmodernism is a new period, where all forms of art and design are passively accepted

“Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally”

A culture of depthlessness (no deep meanings); schizophrenia (can’t separate what is real and what is not); impersonal intensities but not emotions (like movie effects or video games); and a “waning of affect,” no feeling or expressive power, just a cool surface of images copying each other

Another important text, by a Marxist geographer who puts postmodernism in a wider social and

       economic perspective. This is a great overview of modern intellectual and social history:

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1990)

We experience life as if guided purely by ideas; postmodernism makes a kind of sense

As if the struggle of ideas alone creates cultures and change; fail to see the material basis of ideas

Postmodern ideas arise in universities, among academics, not arising out of wider social upheavals

A rising capitalist class had an interest in Enlightenment and modern ideas: they has to displace the

       monarchs and privileged aristocratic classes, to build a society based on investment and merit

Who is the postmodern for? Who fights for it, what social interests are represented by it?

What drives this plural, permissive culture, what determines its logic, its boundaries? Are there any?

Harvey traces rise of modern in the city, in philosophers (Condorcet, Weber, Nietzsche)

In new modern culture: writing (Proust, Joyce); art (Picasso, Duchamp); music (Stravinsky, Bartok)

theatre (Brecht); science (Einstein); industry (Ford); and other fields (Saussure)

Class inserted itself in the modern: workers’ revolutions of 1917 and later in Russia, Germany

       or realist art of working classes in the depression, 1930s

Do we see the world through that lens today? Understand the forces and struggles that drive it?

Tracks key postmodern figures, like Foucault: drive to power diffuse, everywhere in society

Lyotard: there are no big “meta-narratives” anymore, universal themes that can liberate ‘all mankind’

       only local constructs; a vast middle class, not workers vs. the bourgeoisie; just people, not ‘Man’

Harvey also explains the changes in global capitalism since 1973, the first big postwar recession

From 1945 to the mid-1970s, it seemed as though the economic system had solved its crises,

       Depression a distant memory, not a real possibility; only a question of how much growth

Why did economy boom after the war, and why did it return to crisis and slow growth in the ‘70s?

Capitalism has become highly flexible, investments move rapidly across globe,

       new cheap sources of labour appear (tens of millions of Chinese peasants move to cities, e.g.)

Still not enough to create sustainable, livable, and equitable modern world

Like Marx, Harvey looks for the contradiction, the self-defeating principle at the heart of capital

It needs human labour to grow and profit, but it constantly replaces workers with machines

Efficiency pushes out the source of all new value (that’s us), in search for short term gain (see: banks)

A culture that thinks it can escape the need for living labour is the basis of a postmodern culture?

       With its rootless images, a culture without origins or essences, change without progress

This all seems to beg the question: Are Indie media and popular forms of culture an adequate practical response to the loss of confidence in a progressive, or even just a professional, modern culture?  

YSDN Renewal

I realize it has been fully two months since YSDN met at Liberty Cafe, but I have finally put together my notes. I am sorry for the delay, I am a horrible secretary, but they do keep us busy...

I have divided the comments made into categories, as the discussion was wide-ranging and informative. Where to go from here? I have no idea what use or changes the program might be encouraged to make from all this, but I will pursue it -- primarily through the curriculum committee, but outside of that busy body as seems helpful.


Brian Donnelly
_______

Meeting at Victory Café

2011.SEPT.30 — Issues raised at the Renewal meeting

The meeting was held in a crowded and noisy bar in Mirvish Village, with approximately 30 people, plus Brian D and Ed as faculty. There was a large number of recent grads in attendance (possibly one-third to half of the total), as well as representative of all levels except first year.

Cultural issues

Move the program into a shared space downtown; York and Sheridan are

very distinct and separate cultures

Four years not unified, don’t share activities, DSA can’t bridge them

Speaker series; program-wide exhibitions, assemblies, parties, events;

            DesignThinking is good for mixing different years

Bring alumni back into program more

Sharing Information

Crowdsourcing useful information from students on all related topics, such as events and supplies, notice of critique sessions etc., and circulating via a student website

Serve DSA website on YSDN site; use work studies to build these

Links to available scholarships, more outside links needed

More shared critiques outside of class: show work, talk design in social atmosphere,

            Share goals, not just work

Administrative issues

Administration, Executive Committee available for meetings; most students don’t know who they are or what they do: “What does the Chair do? Who is it?”

“Does YSDN have policies?”

No one feels involved or consulted, or that they can have input into any changes

Webpage only consulted for tracking credits; handbook not useful, not read

Need for transparency, consultation on changes and processes

Little communication: profs in classes not the best way to disseminate information;

            Too many central e-mails (office distribution) often ignored

Paying for a mandatory 36 credits “screws over students;”

many take year off to raise money

Can’t take Sheridan courses as elective; York Visual Art courses always full

Not fully prepared for business, need very practical understanding of use of marketing, psychology, behavioural economics, and research in professional context

Curriculum issues

Course descriptions are terrible, inaccurate, confusing; need to really sell the courses

Who is teaching which course? Need to know in advance

Survey of students re: desired courses for next year had to be printed out and handed in (vs. online response); results not announced, no feedback on effectiveness

Expand skills taught / delivery, use charrettes, contract projects in real world, etc.

Workshop could be better linked to second year (Research, i.e.?)

Internship should have part-time option, 100 hours over summer;

3 weeks full-time blocks enrolment in summer courses

Internship rules being subverted by some students, not equal requirements

Students not sure whether to be specialists or generalists; program pushes both

Grad show useful? Or a “slave market;” putting it together only useful thing about it

A final year conference, smaller exhibition venues; more dispersed promotion

Grad show branding is the main identity for grads: “I was in the ‘Splice’ year”

______________

The following is a list of issues previously identified by students, which was handed out and served as an ‘agenda’ of sorts for the Sept. 230 meeting:

Summary of key themes:

Space

• Two campuses, travel, scheduling, cost are problems / move downtown Toronto

• Need a heart, center, free area for the program (a local bar?)

• Too sterile, need stimulating environment (and more outlets in labs)

• Laptop-based program, labs more humanely functional

Life

• Too busy, “your life is officially over”

• Richness outside classes / speakers, trips, exhibitions

• Events for entire program: to start the school year, know each other, staff and faculty

Course content

• Student workload too heavy, controlled / time to develop independently, freedom

• More work by hand, off-computer

• Software support (‘Adobe 101’)

Administration

• Student reps, liaison on committees / actively seek greater input

• Student counselor: peer mentor, RGD and alumni contact

• Interactive YSDN website, 2-way communication

• Resources list for YSDN, including materials, events, entertainment, media