Territory: The territory I have considered in this project in order to understand the changing nature of identity is that of advertising in contemporary society. I have explored the history of advertising, the psychology of advertising and some advertising techniques that are used by companies to persuade. Concepts: The key concepts I have engaged with in this project are: – Loss of agency -Fragile nature of identity -Identity given by society -Identity in flux. Key questions I have engaged with are: -How is our identity formed in modern society? -How has it changed over time? -What are the influential factors on identity? -How do advertising agencies target individuals? -What methods do they use?
Category: Abstracts
Territory – Comedy. Object – Offensive Humour. Concepts – Ethics, Liberty, Utilitarianism. Thinkers – Mill, Freud, Bakhtin. The Two Ways In Which Humour Can Be Evaluated: The aesthetical question concerns when it is fitting to laugh at something, and the ethical question, when is it morally wrong to laugh at something. For example if you claim that you should not laugh at sexist jokes, then in the aesthetic sense that means sexist jokes lack the features that something must have in order to be funny. If someone is amused by these jokes, then in this sense there has been an error of judgement, it’s not that they have done anything morally wrong, rather these kind of jokes fail as comedy. The ethical question, on the other hand, identifies something as morally wrong to laugh at. Linked to this is Ronald De Sousa’s account of how humour works. He claims that in order to be amused by something we have to endorse the attitudes of it. To take the previous example, according to him, some of us will find sexist jokes funny whereas others will not, the difference is in whether you support those attitudes. Therefore it would become immoral to be amused by this type of joke since to find it humorous is to be sexist. Main Objective: I intend to make a study into the area of humour, focusing upon looking into ethics surrounding amusement and attempting to find out whether it could ever be morally perverse or wrong to make jokes, or laugh about particular things. Utilitarian Concept: I shall engage with a utilitarian perspective when it comes to discovering whether finding humour in something could ever be morally wrong. Take for example the Dutch cartoon of Mohammed. Clearly this had a lot of negative consequences and upset a lot of people. Quite obviously blasphemous humour can be offensive. However no utilitarian evaluation is complete without looking at all the consequences, and it could be argued that there was some positive outcomes. It got people talking about religious views, and reflection and discussion are beneficial to individuals and society as a whole. A society with more discourse and exchanging of ideas is a happier society than one without. In that sense jokes such as these could be argued to be for the greater good. Change and Contrast: The historical contrast between the role of parody in the Medieval carnival and the limits of parody in modernity. Medieval Carnival: Generalised ethical permission under which parody, that would have amounted to blasphemy on any other occasion, was acceptable, under a particular kind of social occasion. Modern day there are restrictions on parody and what is acceptable or viewed as offensive. Could not conceive permission to create a parody of a war memorial for example.
One of my main sources links Fight Club with an article by Omar Lizardo named ‘Fight Club, or the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism’, which I found in the Journal for Cultural Research. I chose this because it places quite an original perspective in that it is a reaction to arguments that tend to emphasize Fight Clubs relevance for the study of contemporary representations of gender and masculinity. Lizardo argues ‘that Fight Club can be seen as an attempt to deal with the evacuation and exhaustion of the original form of value-rationality from the realm of production in service work. Basically it contemplates whether class-consciousness in the modern capitalist state has left man with a sense of lost virility, and whether or not Fight Club is a reaction to this. I have chosen to link this with Thomas Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’ which talks of the state of nature and how man gave up his freedom and violent, barbaric ways to conform to civil society under social contract. Sigmund Freud served more as a psychoanalyst and sociologist than a philosopher in this project as I used his work ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ to analyse the possible reasons for the narrator’s breakdown. Many of Freud’s ideas already appear quite blatant and self explanatory in the film, however Freud covers much more material that is not evident at all. I chose to use the film ‘Zeitgeist’ by Peter Joseph as I felt this would be both very interesting material and also would place a very original comparative to Fight Club. I was in complete awe, shock and amazement when I first watched this extremely powerful and scary film and am very passionate about spreading the word about it. It will prove highly relevant to some of the material in Fight Club, and is something that I feel everyone should know about.
Territory: Escapism, our obsession, need for it. What I will use to do this: My mind, Psychology, Fromm, Sociology. We are the only species on this planet that routinely, and necessarily require some form of detachment from our existence. I want to explore this need of ours to escape from the perspective of the protagonist Craig Schwartz in the film ‘Being John Malkovich’. As well as using an individual’s perspective I hope to look at society as a whole, the way it is driven by a mainstream commercialist economy and how this affects our need to subvert our reality from time to time.
From the birth of modernity mans values have been forced into change with the diminishing role of religion in society and the subsequent rising of science and rationality. The object that seems to have become of most importance since the decline of religious beliefs is money. Is there a case then that money has become all that modern society values? Cases of modern day philanthropy, such as those pledges made by famous entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Richard Branson offer an alternative to this view. After the oppressive feudal system governed by the Church, the move onto a capitalist approach was thought of as bringing an otherwise unheard of amount of freedom to the common man. That the individual could now accumulate wealth and use this commodity to raise one’s social standing offered much hope for a liberal future. The modern day philanthropists seems the ideal modern man, whose success in accumulating wealth is then transferred into helping other important social ‘goods’. There is of course criticisms aimed at these capitalist ideals, in this project the works of Marx and Marcuse are of significant interest. Marx is perhaps the most famous opponent of capitalism and his work is used here to describe his idea of money ‘alienating’ man from his fellow man. Marcuse’s ‘1-Dimensional Man’ is a work very critical of those institutions in our advanced industrial society that keep the common man under control. In particular, the mass media and the use of advertising as tools used by modern society to plant ‘false needs’ into the consumer in order to support our ever-increasing rationality. The discussion thus follows whether in modern society there is more to the successful man than wealth. Surely the accumulation of wealth on its own is not something to be admired within a man, instead perhaps it should be that the sharing of wealth is that which we value.
Territory: Graffiti. Object: Graffiti Art. Graffiti as an art movement and global phenomenon, originates in the early 1970’s in New York City. The unique dynamics of the city gave rises to an artistic battleground of expression in a cultural climate of alienation and class divide. As the youth at the heart of American capitalism struggled to gain recognition, the graffiti subculture was born. Using unconventional mediums and the alternative canvas of the urban landscape, graffiti, enveloped the city, the nation and eventually the entire world. Philosophical Concept: Heidegger- The Origin of the work of art. Heidegger’s intent is always to bring us closer to the understanding of Being. Art in its origin, is art; the happening of truth of a people’s historical existence. Great artworks in the current tradition of aesthetics are ripped away from their essential truth when classed as objects to be judged and experienced in pleasure, losing their authenticity and ability to ‘set-up’ a world and ‘set-forth’ the earth. Graffiti’s philosophical relevance: The Truth of Being. Graffiti writing rose out of a particular ‘world’, a horizon of disclosure dominated by capitalist alienation. The struggle of the youths in New York City was a battle of resistance to authority and conformity that led to an artistic battle of expression. In graffiti’s expression, the ‘world’ of the American culture is opened up, the ‘earth’ rips through this ‘world’ in the form of undefined and sublime images of the New York subway trains, taking us out of our everyday world and reminding us of other existing realities. We forget the mysteriousness of truth in its dual essence of aletheia, and the works of the original underground graffiti movement disclose this struggle of world and earth; the truth of Being. It is this struggle that graffiti writers sought to sustain in their works, therefore, graffiti did not originate from art but rather from the truth of a people’s historical existence; the historical truth of being.
The dilemma of whether there is still a place in today’s society is one that still poses a lot of questions, and so I decided to look in more detail at the issue for the basis of my project. I used ‘The Da Vinci Code’ by Dan Brown in order to look at how literature has changed to reflect the decline of religion and faith in society. I realised that due to technological advances, such as developments in medicine, religion and faith have begun to take a backseat in terms of how much influence they still have in people’s lives. Alongside this was the discovery of the fact that religion itself could have changed in that Dan Brown claims that the church itself has been hiding a huge secret: that the Holy Grail is in fact not a chalice as Christians for millions of years have believed, rather it is a woman- Mary Magdalene – and there still exists today the bloodline of Jesus Christ, living descendants. Is it possible that after all this time the Christian faith has been based on a lie? And if that is the case, can it be said that the Christian faith is worth any less? After looking at how religion has changed I moved on to begin to introduce philosophical concepts into my project. I drew on ideas and notions put forward by philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Friedrich Nietzsche: o He did not believe in the divinity of religion, the idea that religion allowed us access to another dimension of reality. o He claimed that science cast doubt on the comfort of religion. o He believed it was fear, not faith that drove people to religion. o He argued that the Christian conception of God was one of the most corrupt images of God to exist. o God is dead. Fyodor Dostoyevsky: He suggested that people were in search of miracles as opposed to looking for a place for God in their lives. He thought that people believed in God because they desired to, not because they truly believed. He advocated a Christianity in which human redemption and resurrection could occur on earth. Every individual has the ability to choose whether or not to believe in God. Throughout my entire project I have attempted to link religion with society, or alternatively assess how society has changed so much that there now is no place in society for religion. The philosophical concepts I used seemed to suggest a change in faith and religion and this is something that I explored in my project. It is evident that religion has less significance in society, and by religion I am referring to the ‘motions’ of religion, such as going to church. However I discovered that many people still call themselves Christians, and so even though religion has declined there is still faith and belief in God, so this led me to conclude that religion might be declining within society, but there is still evidence of God today.
In his online book, Gamer Theory, McKenzie Wark posits the idea that games reflect a more perfect world. He argues that real life has become a gamespace and that it proclaims itself to be fair, promising an ideology that it can’t deliver. This ideology masks the underlying status quos and oppression present in our society. Games, he argues, because they follow exactly those rules that they promise, are a means by which to uncover this schism. Adorno too thought there was a conflict between ideology and actuality. He proposed a theory of negative dialectics and art in order to expose this. Adorno believed that the consumerism that motivates current capitalism was part and parcel of this trend. I will explore both of these thinker’s theory through my territory of games and gaming. The change I will chart is that of the progression of games themselves from the most basic text-based games, such as Zork, to fully-rendered graphic 3D worlds. The pictures above are examples of this. This will become important in my discussion of gaming and how its progression relates to mass culture and the problems Adorno foresaw within mass culture. Gaming ostensibly seems to feed into Adorno’s notion of the culture industry. New consoles, such as the Wii and DS sell 100,000 units every month in Europe and the international games market is expected to reach a gross of £23bn by 2010. I will examine McKenzie Wark’s theory thoroughly to discover if this has any bearing on his claims. I will also look at open source software, such as the Lassie and AGS engines, as a possible solution to this.
For my project, I decided to investigate the role of fashion trends within music. I wanted to discover how the two are connected, and the influence they have upon each other. I wanted to understand how they both change, and the reasons why they change. I focused upon the Punk movement from the 1970s to the present day, which allowed for an easy transition from my stage one project, and still remains an area of importance within my life. Philosophically, I based my investigation on the works of Guy Debord and the Situationists, Surrealism and the works of Deleuze and Guattari. I also included sociological and psychological theories. I studied the role of the mass‐media in great detail, and found that theories presented by neo‐Marxist thinkers allowed me a greater understanding of my subject. I found that the mass media is responsible for the creation of Marxist “Ideology” and Debord’s “Spectacle”. These two create a false world view which allows people to be manipulated by others. I discovered that the media and business plays an important role within alternative rock music and the trends it creates. The media will offer positive or negative press regardless of stylistic content, and big companies will control what music, and its derivatives, are allowed into the public domain. This of course is a display of Debord’s Spectacle, and how alternative rock music has become its victim.
Object: Blues music in the pre and post-war period. The reason I chose to study blues music is because its roots are firmly entrenched in the folk tradition. Subsequently the music is expressive in form and often reflects the current social climate. I studied music recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax and recording artists such as Son House, Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and considered a series of documentary films directed by Martin Scorsese. Change: Blues music progressed from a form of musical expression contained within rural African-American communities to an international phenomenon which saw the likes of the Rolling Stones, Cream, John Mayall and The Kinks re-recording earlier blues songs with greater commercial success. I believe that this change can be attributed to the structural constructs put in place by the dominant modes of production that recognised a potential market and exploited it for capital gains. Concepts: Primarily the Situationist Internationale’s critique of contemporary capitalist society, analysing the idea that modern life has receded into a spectacular representation which is dominated by the commodity form. Accompanying this idea is the notion that spectacular society is capable of co-opting popular movements which question the status-quo into its own reinforcement. In order to provide a link between the Situationist Internationale and the change which blues music underwent during the pre and post-war period I drew upon commentaries by Richard Middleton and Richard Peterson both of whom analyse the role of the recording industry in fabricating authenticity and exploiting a musical market for capital gain.
The title of my project came from watching the film ‘The Pianist’ which graphically depicts the ghettoisation of Warsaw between 1939 and 1942. The film highlighted the complex issues that cultural segregation presents to society and it soon became apparent that the subject held enough significance to use it as a base for my stage two project. I began my investigation of cultural segregation with a look at the history of the ghetto paying particular attention to three examples; firstly I looked at the Warsaw ghetto and segregation of the Jewish population of the city in the Second World War. Secondly I examined the development of the projects of Chicago and their gradual decline. Finally I looked at the Muslim population of cities within the UK and the problems that have arisen from large scale immigration. Within my territory of ghettoisation I identified three main philosophical concepts; 1. Racial Discrimination 2. The Struggle for Identity 3. Strength in Numbers. By studying the theories of Hobbes and Hegel I managed to apply philosophical thought to my concepts. Paying particular attention to Hobbes theory of ‘The State of Nature’ and Hegel’s argument for social unity, succeeded in finding significant arguments within the theorists’ work which applied to the issues raised by the cultural segregation. In conclusion I make a brief summary of what I have managed to achieve during my investigation and offer a personal perspective on the overall reality of ghettoisation and what it suggests about human nature.
In 2005 I spent four months teaching in India and fell in love with this beautiful and dynamic country. I spent the majority of my time living in a village in northern India and what shocked me the most was how such a spiritual country could hold such beliefs on class discrimination. I also noticed how the caste system was not so prevalent in the cities and by talking to people I met I found out that the caste system had a deep and complicated history. Therefore I have found this study on the caste system fascinating because I have managed to apply my research to my own experience of India. I have started this project by looking at possible origins of the caste system and then looking at how strict and rigid the caste system was in early India. The main change that I have focused on in is after WW11 and when Gandhi, who was a spiritual and political leader of India, bought India to independence. In the heart of the project I have shown how Gandhi liberated the strict caste system and how this has affected modern India. Finally I have compared Gandhi’s teachings to the philosophy of Nietzsche and his work “On the Genealogy of Morals,” which demonstrates how he believes that a caste system should be apparent in all societies.
The Territory: Park Güell chosen after my visit to Barcelona. It has been declared a Heritage to Humanity by the Spanish Government and is a beautiful Park to experience first hand. However, it did not enjoy the success it was expected when first built as it was considered too far away from the central city of Barcelona. The Object: The most inspiring part of the Park was the undulating bench situated in the central recreational square, which Gaudi decorated with recycled tiles It is where many locals can meet one another and also holds markets for its citizens as well as tourists. Change: Capitalism has continued to grow for many years. Our almost obsession with buying commodities is further exploiting labourers and making millions for the bourgeoisie. It is no wonder then with capitalism and reification in factories that workers need to escape the alienation and objectification they come to experience through the idea of utopias— whether in nature, physically, or mentally, for some t is there only release from the stresses and strains they become accustomed to. Concept: Looking primarily at Marx; class divisions, exploitation of proletariat class by the bourgeoisie and the effect capitalism has on society as a whole (Communist Manifesto). Secondly, looking at Adorno; Thought a utopian moment could be found through creating true art – reification of workers in a factory, art reflecting the distortions of reality and makes us question our society (Aesthetic Theory). Lastly, looking at Habermas; Believed socialism and liberalism do not bring about solution to crisis of our times, problems in society stem from social and political structures of capitalism (Theory of Modernity).
Territory: Black Sabbath, their music shaped a new movement and style, the term ‘heavy metal’ came about to embody their music. Often overlooked and discarded Sabbath’s music would go on to be the forerunner and influence of many other great rock and metal artists. Concepts: My project aims to explore the territory of Black Sabbath and its relation, or non-relation, to the ideals and principles of Surrealism. I shall also be using the secondary concept of ressentiment in music using Nietzsche’s works on The Birth of Tragedy and use other musical styles to support my ideas. These shall be my two main concepts but I will also be using other philosophers that have interested me and have specific relevance to my project, for example Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea in which he discusses the role of music in society. My interest is to see if I can apply philosophies intended for their own times to a modern era of music.
My project will be based on the violence in films. During the course of my work I will be looking at three different films- “A Clockwork Orange” (written by Anthony Burgess and adapted to film by Stanley Kubrick), “The Football Factory” (written by John King and adapted to film by Nick Love) and the infamous “Fight Club” (written by Chuck Palahniuk and directed by David Fincher). Questions 1) Why do people take part in violent acts? 2) What do these acts represent? Are they pure needless violence or related to something, such as a sense of community, boredom or simply fulfilling a sensual need? 3) What can we take from the conclusions drawn? Can we somehow relate the violence in films to the violence we see in things like football hooliganism and the rise of violent sports? How does violence relate to my concepts? Concept 1: Religiosity. George Bataille and Emile Durkheim. The pair’s idea of religion as a unifying force means that they may feel that the characters in A Clockwork Orange are substituting conventional/organised religion for their own violence based religion. Concept 2: Alienation. Karl Marx. Alienation indicates the separation of things that genuinely belong together. In regards to humans, it refers to the alienation of people from features of “human nature”. People may argue that violence is part of the human nature, and so through the repression of this violent streak, we feel alienation.
The aim of this project is to understand UK hip-hop as a form of cultural expression through a comparison with British folk-revival. Both can be understood as rejections of modernity. Central concepts for discussion will be: tradition and community individuality and novelty, modernism and postmodernism. For an understanding of folk-revival and tradition, I will examine Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. MacIntyre’s conception of tradition and virtue ethics will be compared with Nietzsche and the ethics of postmodernism or late capitalism.
Object: Islam in the West. Concepts: Liberalism, Pluralism, Postmodernism. Thinkers: Bell, Vattimo, Habermas. Main Objective: This project will critically examine the normative relationship between Islam and the West in order to explore the metaphysical divide which purports to propel the two world-views into a so-called “clash of civilisations”. Intended Knowledge Outcomes:By engaging in this project, I intend to accomplish four objectives: Firstly, I seek to research the recent emergence of Islam in the West as a produce of post-colonial migration. Secondly, I aim to become acquainted with the motivations for its growing influence among the “disenchanted” Muslim communities within the West. As a third objective, I plan to use the thought of Daniel Bell, Gianni Vattimo, and Jurgen Habermas to investigate the arguments for and against liberalism, pluralism, and postmodernism. Finally, I wish to demonstrate the connection between the philosophical debate over postmodernism and the contemporary debate on Islam and its place within the Western liberal model.
Territory: I have chosen to consider the individual through the concept of identity within contemporary society in order to ascertain whether it has truly been ‘lost.’ I also want to consider through this that if it has been lost, what has caused this, and is this necessarily a bad thing? What does it mean to be individual today? Areas of Investigation: I will explore the relationship between the individual and society by looking at the evolution of the individual and what it has meant to be individual. Change: I will compare my territory to the Elizabethan period in the 1600s, as the affect religion and the monarchy had on the individual and on shaping identity compared to nowadays will provide an interesting point of difference. I will also explore why this has changed, and the effects of this change. Philosophical Ideas and Concepts: I will use the work of both Adorno and Levinas to explore my territory within the concept of identity. Adorno focused upon critiquing the concept of identity thinking by exploring it through the way individuals and objects can be subsumed under cover concepts. I will use this to explore what enables this to occur and what in fact happens when people are subsumed, such that it will provide information about what constitutes the individual, and how it could be lost. I will specifically look at his work regarding the Holocaust, where people were subsumed under the concepts of vermin or as merely scientific tools I will also consider Levinas’ work in regards to the Other in order to explore my territory in opposition to Adorno’s ideas. Levinas’ Other will demonstrate the importance of defining the individual in relation to society through the Other. Conclusions: I seek to show that identity can be both fixed and fluid such is the nature of society, our modern identity and our relationship to it.
After experiencing a dream so real to me I could not believe I was dreaming I have come to question what I believe to be real around me. In this project I have investigated the present and past key concepts, thoughts and theories behind dreaming and lucid dreaming, it became clear to me quickly much of my thoughts are that of a skeptic I quite literally began to doubt everything around me. Descartes is famous for his dream argument so his meditations are a key feature within my project as he has influenced the works of Freud who also came up with some key theories to dreaming and why we dream. I introduce the idea of the Truman show and the matrix as recent examples of people’s thoughts about reality, technology today allows for these science fiction films to be made and they are made in such a way where you sit back and think well why not? Why can’t that be real? What is the point to all of this? My intentions were to evaluate whether or not the “truth” is worth pursuing…or is ignorance quite literally bliss? Are dreams an escape to a realm that is perhaps more real to us than the life we consider to be real while we are awake, or is it quite literally what you see is what you get. Do we create our own realities and if we do then does this mean millions of different realities exist as we can never know for sure we all perceive things in exactly the same way as the person next to us.
Having danced for 15 years before coming to University I wanted to grasp the opportunity to study dance in a different light with both hands. In this project I got the chance to explore dance in its different forms at different points throughout history. Tribal and ritual dance, dance in ancient Greece, Folk dance, Ballet dance, Ballroom, Modern and Contemporary Dance. Each dance form has played a different social role and has contributed to individuals’ lives: ritual dance attempted to bring about results when there was nothing else a community had the power to do, Folk dance brought the community together. Dance also has a role as an art form and as a means of expression, it can also provide structure and discipline through tuition or become a means of channelling emotion or aggression or even be an escape from the world. I wanted to explore this changing role of dance throughout time and within varying cultures and societies. Why is there no fixed role for dance? I wanted to look at how dance’s role alters depending on the historical or social context. Do we take from dance what we need from it at that particular time and place in history? Did we turn to dance rituals because we had no other answers? Did we use freer more provocative dance as an outward expression of women’s liberation? Is the discipline in dance tuition useful now to focus our young generation that seems to have gone off the rails? Is it necessary now as a creative outlet in a society obsessed with standardisation? It seems that we cannot escape dance, it has existed in varying forms throughout most of history and I believe it always will do. Dance can transform to suit whatever our culture or society needs from it and it can also transform us. This is part of the beauty of dance; it is a tool for us as individuals and as a society. Philosophical Sources: Nietzsche on Art; Helen Thomas’s Sociology of Dance; Peter Brinson’s Dance as Education, Towards a National Dance Culture; Susan Leigh Foster; Francis Sparshott.