Globalization I: Postmodernism

Postmodernism, Representation

and History

1. Postmodernity & Globalization3. Reflexive Postmodernism vs. Cultural Imperialism

Outline

Starting Questions & Quiz 2-1 From Modernity to Postmodernity: a

Review Postmodern Culture

2-2 : (Skip --David Harvey) Time-Space Compression

2-3: (J. Baudrillard) Simulation

2-4: (F. Jameson) Loss of Affect & History 2-5 : Next time: Reflexive Postmodernism

2-6: Next time: Globalization as Cultural Imperialism?

Starting Questions & a Quiz

What is Postmodernity? And modernity? What are the characteristics of

postmodernism? What are the examples of postmodernism

that you know of? How do we analyze In Country as a

postmodern film? And Forrest Gump?

Postmodernism 2-1

From Modernity toPostmodernity

From Modernity to PostmodernityModernity Postmodernity

Fordism Post-Fordism

Organized capitalism Disorganized capitalism

Mechanical reproduction Electronic Reproduction

central and rational organization of manpower and capital

Flexible accumulation of capital, sub-contracting

Standardization of production

Flexible production of parts

Manufacturing industry; Products as main commodity

Service industry; information as capital.

From Modernity to Postmodernity (2)

Consumption, lifestyle

Consumer Society and Biopolitics: Overall commodification, Reification and fragmentation of history & human identity, Governing the whole population and its life through life style and reproduction

Image/Spectacle Society: Dissociation of Commodities from their use value, Signs from their traditional meanings (or signifier from signified)

Compression of Time-Space (skip)

Increasing emphasis on

Postmodernism: A Summary

Features ：1. Depthlessness, pastiche,

image and simulation, commodification

2. metafictional (self-reflexive 後設 ), ambiguous, eclectic 折衷

3. boundary-crossing , pluralistic

4. questioning meta-narrative, de-doxification 質疑大敘述／真理

Related Theorists and examples in class

1. F. Jameson (nostalgia film, Forrest Gump; In Country)

2. L. Hutcheon (The Stunt Man and Cindy Sherman)

3. Hutcheon (Obasan, Ararat), and C. Jencks ( 清水休憩站 )

4. F. Lyotard (internet publication via YouTube, Blog ???)

Postmodernism 2-2

Cultural/Economic Flows in Postmodern Time and Space

Postmodern Time and Space

1. Separation of Time, Space and Place from each other -- thru’

2. Disembeddedness of social relations and signs – and re-embedding: the re-definition of traditional signs/relations in a new context.

Postmodern Time and Space (2)3. Compression: 1) The pace of production and communication get

accelerated so that boundaries are broken and “this world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us" (Harvey 240).

"The central value system . . . is dematerialized and shifting, time horizons are collapsing, and it is hard to tell exactly what space we are in when it comes to assessing causes and effects, meanings or values" (Harvey 298).

"The interweaving of simulacra in daily life brings together different worlds (of commodities) in the same space and time. But it does so in such a way as to conceal almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the labour processes that produced them, or of the social relations implicated in their production" (300)

Cultural and Economic Flows –Worldwide, but uneven

1. Transcultural flows –culture travels to us as ‘signs and commodities’

2. Spreading of Western culture and technologies;

3. Disjunctive Flows –multiple “scape” (scene; e.g. landscape),. e.g. the disjunctive flows of ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes

4. multiple cores, multiple semi-peripheries and peripheries.

Postmodernism 2-3: Simulation

What is simulation? And simulacrum?

Is it possible to know the “Real”? Is postmodern representation

completely self-referential (or non-representational).

Simulation and the Hyperreal

Denies the binarism of True/False, Reality/Fiction by introducing the third term: the hyperreal (textbook 7: 361)

Hyperreality – the only real is that which can be reproduced. “the precession of simulacra” (365)

no text is original; everything is simulation. Do you agree? Let’s get some examples first.

Simulation Fable

A Borges tale: the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory

with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts

The shreds [like Ozymandias’ status in Shelley’s poem]: an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing

Some of Baudrillard’s Examples

A. the biological and scientific -- 1. simulation of symptoms; 10. DNA model reproduction; 11. Nuclear deterrence

B. the religious -- 2. the simulacrum of divinity; C. museumification of culture -- 3. the return of the Tasaday; 4.

the salvage of Rameses' mummy, 5. return of the parts of a Cloister to its origin

D. popular culture -- 6. Disney; 9. the filming of the Loud family in California ( Madonna)

E. the political -- 7. Watergate; 12. Vietnam war, Algerian war

F. social crimes -- 8. all holdups, hijacks ( Face Change 高天民 )

Textbook 366

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

Representation and Simulation

(textbook 385)These would be the successive phases of

the image:1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.

2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.

3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.

4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

Representation and Simulation—assumption of an essential realityessential reality

Kate’s handout pp. 13-14

112/04/20

Central Issue: The Postmodern Debate

Positive (e.g. critical arts and social practices)

Negative (e.g. media postmodernism, consumer culture)

De-centering (subversive of mainstream systems); Empowering the margins

A-political, complicitous, intensifying its logic of overall commodification; imperialistic

Anti-foundationalism, Pluralism

Boundary-breaking

Constructing subjectivity

Parody

Skepticism, Relativism, lack of critical distance;

Death of the subject (loss of affect); Loss of History; Pastiche, kitsch

Textbook – no point of reference, anything goes (p. 361)

Critique of Postmodernism: F. Jameson as an Example (1) Loss of Affect

Van Gogh’s peasant shoes

Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes

Monroe by Andy Warhol

Postmodernism 2-4: History

Nostalgia Film

F. Jameson’s Critique (2): Loss of History

Pastiche ( 大雜燴 blank parody--parody with no critical intent or [central]point of reference) Eclipses Parody (critical of a norm)-- style becomes codes, reassembled playfully and without critical intent (e.g. Top Gun Hot Shot, Moulin Rouge, Ferris Beuler’s Day Off 蹺課大王 , Date Movie)

Nostalgia Film -- the past becomes a composite of stereotypes, spectacles; no stars (with 'personality' in the older sense)

e.g. 1) historical films – 《大宅門》、《康熙》、 《雍正》、《乾隆 》

e.g. 2) Postmodern pastiche or sci-fi – Somewhere in Time, Back to Future, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, etc.)

F. Jameson’s Critique (2): Loss of History

“Nostalgia for the Present” e.g. Time Out of Joint, Blue Velvet (see notes)

Presents the 50’s as a composition of images (e.g. Blue Velvet) the evil (e.g. Frank): “the emptiest form of sheer Otherness (into

which any type of social content can be poured at will). (textbook 404)

No historical novel (of the 19th century type) anymore historical novel: emergence of historicity nostalgia film: its enfeeblement and repression

Historicity defined: a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective (textbook 399-40) cognitive map

Postmodernism 2-5

(Self-)Reflexive Postmodernism

Reflexive Postmodernism (chap 6 pp. 152-)

‘the figural’ over the ‘discursive’ aestheticization of everyday life.

The readers or consumers thus get their choices in the aesthetic combination/interpretation of signs.

112/04/20

Postmodern Self-Reflexive Texts: the other types

Questioning Boundaries between reality and fiction Vanilla Sky; Mulholland Drive The Purple Rose of Cairo, 暗戀桃花源 , Stuntman

Questioning Consumer Culture Icicle Thief

Questioning History Ararat and 阮玲玉 Novels by 平路、張大春 , etc. etc.

Postmodernism 2-6

Cultural Imperialism vs. Globalization

Cultural Imperialism argument (textbook

chap 5:115- )

--the dominance , worldwide, of a standardized, 'homogenized' consumer culture, emanating from western (and particularly North American) capitalism, represents a form of global cultural regulation.

Basic thesis: certain dominant cultures threaten to overwhelm other more vulnerable ones. e.g. America over Europe, "the West over the Rest," the core over the periphery, capitalism over more or less everyone.

Cultural Imperialism argument: two major strands: 1. "anti-Americanism"--against American

cultural and economic dominance, could be a form of cultural protectionism (e.g. the banning of importation or use of satellite dishes in Islamic states).

Danger of protectionism or nationalism: who are "we" that get represented in national culture?

Cultural Imperialism argument: two major strands:

2. against transnational capitalism supported by communication systems--

Examples of cultural domination: Disney, Hollywood Film [e.g. the film Evita], MacDonald's, Coca-Cola, Nike—and even Internet.

Hides the facts of exploitation; Liking them (esp. those cultural texts such as Mu

Lan and Sex in the Cities), we absorb their ideologies, too.

Cultural Imperialism argument: Counter-Argument

1. not predominantly American culture—The complex cross-cutting and overlay of communication

paths and flows takes on a less benign aspect: now it appears as a 'web' which enmeshes and binds all cultures. the dominant culture as "the 'distanciated' influences" which order our everyday lives b. imports operate at a 'cultural discount'

Cultural Imperialism argument: Counter-Argument

2. Viewer reception: the viewers may receive dominant culture differently. -- patterns of TV viewing--a. 'primetime' scheduled for local shows

-- A research done of the viewer reception of Dallas ( 朱門恩怨 ) in Holland, which shows indeed a diversity of more localized responses.

Cultural Imperialism argument: Counter-Argument

3. the 'decentring' of capitalism from the West --against core-periphery argument: This structuring of the global capitalist system assures the continued economic weakness, cultural subordination and conditions for the exploitation of the Third World by the First. It does not adequately grasp the complexities of the operation of global capitalism.

But how about the influences of Japan and Korea here?

Multiple Cores and peripheries.

Cultural Imperialism argument: Counter-Argument

Globalization is a global project Globalization is unlikely to produce an entirely

regulated, homogenized global culture. A. 'indegenization' of Western cultural goods, localization B. deterritorialization caused by the capital; by the immigrants from Asia, Africa or Latin America

References

Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture.Nationalism, globalization and modernity. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage, pp. 31-55

Frederic Jameson -- http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/jameson.htm

Notes 1

Philip K. Dick – the author of stories based on which Blade Runner and Total Recall were made.

波坦金村 (Potemkin village) 有一次凱薩琳大帝要出巡波坦金的領地時，波坦金為了使女皇對他領地的富足有個良好印象，不惜工本，在凱薩琳大帝視察百姓生活情況時必經的路旁建起一批豪華的假村莊。

Notes 2: Time Out of Joint

The protagonist Ragle Gumm believes that he lives in the year 1959 in a quiet American suburbHis unusual profession consists of repeatedly winning the cash prize in a local newspaper competition called, "Where will the little green man be next?".

Gumm's 1959 has some differences from ours: the Tucker car is in production, and Uncle Tom's Cabin was recently written. As the novel opens, strange things begin to happen to Gumm. A soft-drink stand disappears, replaced by a small slip of paper with the words "Soft-Drink Stand" written on it. Pieces of our 1959 turn up: an article on Marilyn Monroe (who didn't exist in their world), and radios (which had been abandoned at the dawn of television).

Gumm actually lives in a then-future Earth (circa 1998). (source: Wikipedia)

Note 3 Blue Velvet

Opening scene – images of the 50’s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM975_Ld9S0