Freedom of choice?

In this week's reading, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that we have become a fully-fledged society of consumers - our primary social role is to buy, use, eat, watch (that is to say, consume) the limitless products offered by late capitalism.

Consumer society appears to offer us an ever-expanding freedom of choice; Bauman alters this picture, arguing that choice is no longer best seen as a freedom, but as a duty.

The responses of our political leaders to two of the defining crises of recent times - the World Trade Center attacks, and the Global Financial Crisis - has been to urge us to get out and shop. Consumption, it seems, is the necessary positive response to troubled times.

Can this compulsory consumption still be regarded as 'freedom'? Is it possible to exercise the freedom not to choose?

Society of the Spectacle

We touched briefly on an important predecessor of Baudrillard - Guy DeBord - in this week's lecture.

As with a number of the theorists we've considered so far, DeBord has a talent for snappy phrases that take on a life of their own, and are often misconstrued. Like 'The Death of the Author,' or 'The Desert of the Real,' 'The Society of the Spectacle' is often deployed without proper respect to the theorist's whole argument.

If you want to know more about the intriguing notion of social life 'as an immense accumulation of spectacles,' there's a full translation here.

Need help with Jameson?

'Cultural Logic' isn't an easy read (particularly when Jameson launches abruptly from some general historical statement into a dizzying reading of this or that cultural artefact) but it is an indispensable plank in this course. This mini-site from Fu Jen University should help you come to grips with the basics.

To augment the picture we painted in week two, here's a reproduction of Simon Reynolds' review of the book-length version of Jameson's theory, originally from The Observer in 1991.

Reynolds gives a really good sense of the totalising ambitions of Jameson's work.

And while you're at it, if you're interested in post-punk music and culture, you can't do better than Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again.

enjoy!

Essay FAQs

Hi All,

the blog seems like a logical place to post FAQs and answers about the essays.

We'll enter the question as the original post, and our answers as comments. Feel free to post clarifying questions in the comments, or to email your tutor a new question to be posted and answered.

Happy writing!

Vonnegut doco

We hope you enjoyed Slaughterhouse Five, possibly the most straightforward, and certainly the most sweet-natured text in the course.

For those who'd like to see more of the Vonnegut documentary played briefly before the lecture, all eight episodes are here.

The painting to the left is one of Mr Vonnegut's own, of a Tralfamadorian.

He apparently found painting far less painful than writing ... I wonder why?

The response to modernist elitism

If you're still trying to get your head around the relationship of postmodern art to its predecessors, here's a word from Terry Eagleton about the response to modernism:

What is parodied by postmodernist culture, with its dissolution of art into the prevailing forms of commodity productions, is nothing less than the revolutionary art of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

Modernism is among other things a strategy whereby the work of art resists commodification, holds out by the skin of its teeth against those social forces which would degraded it to an exchangeable object.

Postmodernism, confronted with this situation, will then take the other way out. If the work of art really is a commodity then it might as well admit it, with all the sang froid it can muster. Rather than languish in some intolerable conflict between its material reality and its aesthetic structure, it can always collapse that conflict on one side, becoming aesthetically what it is economically. The modernist reification – the art work as isolated fetish – is therefore exchanged for the reification of everyday life in the capitalist marketplace. The commodity as mechanically reproducible exchange ousts the commodity as magical aura…. If the high modernist work has been institutionalized within the superstructure, postmodernist culture will react demonically to such elitism by installing itself within the base.

From Eagleton The Illusions of Postmodernism Oxford : Blackwell, 1996

Welcome to the 2009 edition of the Postmodernism blog.

Think of this space as an extension of the tutorials - somewhere you can test, debate and extend your ideas about postmodernism. The comments function serves as a really useful forum for just this purpose.

The blog is strictly supplementary - we'll be using it to post interesting tidbits, diversions and illustrations, and to allow you to keep the dialogue rumbling, 24/7.

It's no substitute for lectures, tutes and assigned reading!

To get things going for this week, I've uploaded two of the images discussed in the lecture, Van Gogh's 1885 A Pair of Shoes, and Warhol's 1980 Diamond Dust Shoes.

What's so radically different about the two?

Do both qualify as 'art'?

What kinds of challenges to prior notions of 'art' does Warhol's work issue?