Introduction: For over 2000 years, it would seem that man has developed and evolved without ever fully coming to grips with one of the most basic commands in Greek philosophy. Western culture today places a great emphasis on replacing religious belief with scientific knowledge, today we are surrounded by knowledge and technology, yet we know very little about ourselves. My dissertation will be focussed on the ‘self’. In my work, I will be drawing reference upon the work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, two of the most prominent social theorists of the modern world, both of whom have dedicated much of their time to the concept of the self. I will be examining separately their theories on the narrative biography, modern reflexivity, the fragmented self and the effects of modern society on the individual. I will also be exploring how the concept of the self has developed over time, along with the status of the individual in society. I aim to discuss the ways in which Western society has changed dramatically over time, for example the way in which during the industrial ages science began to replace tradition and religion. I will be looking at the impact of industrialisation on the concepts of time, space and place in modernity and the influence of society itself on the individual. I will also be devoting some time to studying the effect of modern conditions such as globalisation on society and our current status as a ‘risk society’. I aim to determine the media’s influence in the creation of this risk society, and the resulting impact of the risk society on the development of the modern individual. I will also be exploring the role of the media in the formation of modern identity, and whether the media and other knowledge systems subconsciously feeds the human mind a set of values and ideals that they in turn begin to live by, whilst still believing that they maintain an independent, individual status. Finally, I aim to have some insight into the future of the ‘self’ in our society in the postmodern world.
Category: 2005
An exploration of romanticism in the world of the caped crusader with reference to the work and ideas of Goethe and Schopenhauer. Characteristics of Goethe’s Romanticism present in Batman: • Heroic despair – isolation of Batman, melancholy that leads to the creation of Batman prominent feature in Romanticism. • Attraction to the darkside – evil forces in Gotham City hold a mystifying hold over Batman. • Nightmare landscape – Gothic architecture, Gotham is a physical manifestation of Bruce’s fears. • Wasteland – Wayne manor is the wasteland representing some aspect of lack in Batman’s world. • Ambivalence – present in the ordinary citizen in Gotham City, resolved themselves to a life where crime and fear are a major factor. • Villainy – endless supply of villains and arch-enemies in Gotham City. • Murder – Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered when he is a child. • Death – death of Bruce’s parents marks the death of his innocence. • Impossible love – Bruce’s lack of relationship is a source of sorrow and insanity. Relevance of Schopenhauer in Batman: • Batman is unable to achieve happiness because it is something that does not exist. • Suffering is an essential part of life. • Batman displays a great amount of sympathy for others and is particularly sensitive to their pain, characteristics of Schopenhauer’s good man. • However, he has not quite freed himself from his will and as such will never achieve any value in his life according to Schopenhauer. Only in non-existence can he seek refuge.
My territory for this project is The Big Issue Magazine, which after a thorough study illustrated a multiplicity of recurring themes, namely those of alienation, exploitation and ideology and the broader issue of social exclusion. “The Big Issue was set up as a business in 1991 to give homeless people the chance to make an income. It campaigns on behalf of homeless people. It allows homeless people to voice their views and opinions.” It is essentially concerned with giving those people remaining in poverty a voice in the media but also to provide a positive image of the homeless themselves, within society. I decided to use Marx and primarily his and Engel’s text The German Ideology as one of the prominent sources for my essay. This is for numerous reasons. Firstly, I wanted to look at The Big Issue Magazine in terms of Ideology and consequently the impact differing ideologies have on society (for this I also looked at the ideas of Louis Althusser). I also hoped to appropriate his views on alienation and exploitation to the modern consensus of what it is to be homeless and in poverty. However, I discovered that it was possible to suggest that although Big Issue vendors appear to be “helping themselves” they too are in the midst of exploitation at its most sinister level. This discovery lead me to the text by David Harvey entitled The Condition of Postmodernity. It discusses the fact that since the 1970’s there has been a somewhat disintegration between the differing classes of society and this provides a veiling, a montage of fictional images, so to speak, of the community’s true circumstances. So my project therefore concentrates itself on this change, namely the modern and postmodern attitudes towards the inequality of people and consequently society’s attendance to such matters.
Aim: To discover why certain types of heroes are popular in films, animation and graphic novels, and why we are attracted to such qualities. Method: Analysing some of the more interesting and obscure characters to ascertain why people are attracted to more nihilistic, free-thinking traits. To do this I will look at ideas such as nihilism, escapism and boredom, and correlate them with research into transcendence, innocence, naivety, and rebelliousness. Characters explored will include Roman Dirge’s Lenore, Jhonen Vasquez’s Johnny The Homicidal Maniac (pictured above), the residents of Sobriety Straight in Dame Darcy’s Meat Cake, and the Norse God Loki who features in The Mask. Sources: The Modern Stranger – Lesley D. Harman, Comic Book Nation – Wright, Dame Darcy’s Meat Cake Compilation – Dame Darcy, JTHM – Jhonen Vasquez, Lenore: Noogies – Roman Dirge.
• My chosen territory: magazine advertising • My aim: explore the field of magazine advertising, investigate the truth within, and discuss in reference to the changes in the philosophies of truth. • My workbook explains how the concept for my project evolved from researching my chosen territory, and lead into the philosophy involved. • I started to research a few facts and figures about advertising in the media, and then gathered some examples of the advertising itself. • Then I began to investigate the possible philosophical issues that could be involved, for example: Karl Marx – discussing the power of the consumer on ads – the ‘masses’ have become the middle classes, who hold the most jobs, consume the most goods, and provide the state with the most revenue. Bertrand Russell – the pursuit of happiness – an admirable social goal, which he defines as “a profound instinctive union with the stream of life”. And also, Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer – in respect of manipulation -they formulated the Frankfurt School vision of the innocent man and the guilty social institutions. I took a closer look at Sigmund Freud who described how non-satisfaction of powerful instincts leads to ‘cultural frustration’. And also his nephew Edward Bernays, perhaps the world’s first Spin Doctor, he called for the implementation of mass psychology by which public opinion might be controlled. • But then I struck on the concept of truth. Its significance and value is universally recognised, and yet is often manipulated by the advertising industry. Surprisingly, a complete account of the nature of truth has been notoriously elusive. Whereas the aim of science is to discover which of the propositions in its domain are true, i.e. which propositions possess the property of truth, the central philosophical concern of truth is to discover the nature of that property. It is not, What is true? but rather, What is truth? • There are 3 main theories. Firstly, the Correspondence Theory – an Aristotelian thesis, perhaps the most widely held account, it states that a belief is true provided there exists a fact corresponding to it. However if it is to provide a complete theory of truth, then it must be supplemented with accounts of what ‘facts’ are, and what it is for a belief to correspond to fact. • A popular alternative is to identify truth with verifiability. This idea can take on various forms. The Coherence Theory, developed by Bradley and Brand Blanchard, involves the further assumption that verification is holistic. Another version, from Dummett and Putnam, states that a true proposition can be verified by the appropriate procedure. In mathematics this amounts to the identification of truth with provability and is sometimes referred to as ‘intuitionistic truth’. Such theories however, appear to overestimate the link between knowability and truth, for we can easily imagine a statement that, though true, is beyond our power to verify. • The third major theory is the Pragmatic Theory, which argues that true beliefs are a good basis for action, and takes this to be the very nature of truth. True assumptions are said to be, by definition, those that provoke actions with desirable results. But again, the central objection is that the link it postulates, in this case between truth and its utility, is overestimated.
Aim To discover the importance of contemporary television broadcasting to the nature of our society and culture. Objectives 1. To explore the key concept of ideology as interpreted by poststructuralists such as Foucault and Althusser as well as the Gramscian notion of hegemony. 2. To investigate the way that we are unconsciously manipulated into receiving cultural values and class position by the world around us. To show that existing within the context of a society dominated by the influence of a capitalist media engine shapes the normative conditions of these evaluations, and illustrate how constant change allows modern capitalist society to revamp and perpetuate itself through self-referential discourse. 3. To trace some of the patterns and phenomena in our modern media. To establish what might have caused the proliferation and success of ‘reality television’ and the cult of celebrity. To understand how television invades our homes and turns us into consumers in our own front room, transforming unique individuals into aspiring capitalists engaged in the systematic labour of production and consumption. Method Close reading of texts such as Foucault’s ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’ and ‘Power/Knowledge’ and Gramsci’s ‘Selections from the Prison Notebooks’ as well as an examination of recent trends in television and the effects of modern celebrity on individuality.
A Rhizome, as in the Botanical definition means a plant which grows horizontally and in a discontinuous manner by sending out runners. Deleuze and Guattari’s comes from this idea of roots of becoming divergent. The Rhizome is different to the arborescent root. The growth is vertical not horizontal. This is a tree like structure which, in terms of within the music press represents a hierarchy of opinion or influence. With the rapid growth in different music publications the structure of the business may be changing as technology and the demands of the consumer change. Also with the creation of different genres or sub cultures comes the demand for attention and often publications specific to that genre or style. With this interest in turn comes the capitalist interests and the potential for what Deleuze and Guattari call deterritorialization; a move from the minor to the major due to capital. The importance of having an independent music press for the consumer and for bands/artists. Is an independent and honest music media something that we should be concerned about or something which the masses really want- The need for some direction, for leaders. What are the arborescent papers or programmes now? Has the shift changed, or is it changing and do organs such as NME and channels such as MTV still exert the massive influence over the music press. The change is a change from totalities and uniformity, the power structure of the arborescent in which everything derives from the same homogenous, commanding trunk. The change is a change towards a decentred production of information which resists any temptation to coagulate around a power source, around uni-polar modalities, in favour of a free associating heterogeneity of all, a true multiplicity, a rhizome.
A look into the shifted ideals of religion, human spirituality and the replacement of conventional religion with new spiritualities. Objectives To investigate what has happened to religious belief since the enlightenment. How conventional religion has slowly throughout the last two hundred years become fragmented and changed along with its effect on human spirituality. The damage that the enlightenment did to major religions. The effect lack and subsequent regaining of faith In new and different ways. Our attitude to religion has changed so far, that although we now believe ourselves to be free of its grasp, we are more under its thrall. Concepts: Replacement of Religion, shifting role of religion and human frailty of will. Territory: Religion throughout Europe since the Enlightenment
The Aim of this project is to explore suffering in society. My project initially centred on answering the following questions 1 What is suffering? 2 Does suffering help define our existence? 3 If so, why do we use suffering to define ourselves? 4 Does suffering help us understand the problems we face, or create more? 5 Why do we use suffering more than other emotions, such as happiness, to examine and define our lives? After answering these questions I then applied the answers I found plus the theses of the two philosophers above to the crisis of depression in the modern rich western society.
Territory: The picture here shows a detail of one of the feature pyramids of the Kostnice Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora, near Prague. The Ossuary contains a jar of earth reportedly from Golgotha, and important Christian site, making the chapel an extremely popular place to bury loved ones. Over-population of the graveyard led to the creation of the Ossuary in 1511. Initial Aims: The Sedlec Ossuary has left a lasting impression on me and I wanted to sort out for myself why it had the impact it did. This helped me to generate a list of basic questions to answer, some of which were: ▫ How much is identity an abstract concept? To what extent is it bound up in our bodies? ▫ Do most people experience a crisis of identity as some philosophers believe (eg Sartre’s crisis of the enormity of our freedom) or is it only provoked by trauma? ▫ How rigid is our personal identity? Is identity purely conscious or can our identity remain even if we do not? ▫ Are we alienated from our bodies or united with them through our identity? ▫ How does identity work in a social situation? Key Concepts and Philosophical Models: The most obvious key concepts are identity and the mind/body divide. My chosen philosophers as key thinkers and their works are: ▫ Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit ▫ Beck & Beck-Gernsheim: Individualization Basic Overview: ▫ Hegel: Use and abuse of the master/slave relationship. ▫ Beck & Beck-Gernsheim: Individualization as a concept is self-perpetuating.
Fear has always been with us. Fear has always been used in politics, as a means to control, both for the good and for the bad. Hobbes: The fear of the state of nature, led the people to accept a sovereign. Montesquieu: The fear of the tyrannical despot means people are bound to democracy. Tocqueville: Fears of the consequences of being ostracised by society mean people have conformed to the tyrannical majority. 9/11 has brought about a new kind of fear in the people of the U.S.A. It caused paranoia about a devastating attack from an anonymous face to spread through society. The people in their abject fear have turned to the government to protect them. The style of government they have chosen that they feel will protect them best is a new brand of conservatism, one that is even further right on the political spectrum; this government is Neoconservatism. What of this regime that is here to save us? It again marks a change in society. For centuries in western societies we have moved towards progressively freer societies. The implementation of a Neoconservative government, has changed this, we are seeing the abolition of civil liberties, no trial by jury, the detainees of suspects in prison for years without charge. This is not peculiar to the U.S buts its influence as the one true super power is immense, and it has sparked similar policy changes elsewhere. The political thinker Leo Strauss has heavily influenced neoconservatives. In particular his doctrine on natural right. We must try and understand the work of Leo Strauss, if we are to understand what the people find so attractive about this style of government. The Neoconservatives are particularly influential in the areas of defence and foreign policy, the two key areas for the protection of the U.S.A from the “axis of evil”. Again we must turn to Strauss to understand how his philosophy has influenced the policies that affect us all today.