The project will examine the problems that confronted the Situationist International from 1957 to 1968 and show how those same problems are addressed almost half a century later in the film, Fight OutlineClub. Aim: To argue that that the problems faced by the SI are still evident today and that the events presented in Fight Club are symptomatic of this. Method: The following aspects of both Situationist thought and the themes discussed in Fight Club will be used to support my argument: – Commodification and Consumerism: Both Guy Debord and Tyler Durden felt society had become ‘over-reliant’ on material possessions. – The Society of the Spectacle: The product of this over-reliance. Debord’s term for the vicarious nature of modern life. – Detournement: The process of defacing or editing already existing pieces of art, film, music, literature or architecture. Tyler’s assignments in Fight Club are deeply rooted in this idea. – The LA Riots, the Strasbourg Scandal, May 1968 and ‘Project Mayhem’: These events marked the culmination of both SI thought and Tyler’s desires in Fight Club. – Situationist Film and Fight Club Itself: Both looked to push the boundaries and confront traditional cinematic norms. – Terrorism: Could the Situationists be viewed as terrorists? The members of ‘Project Mayhem’ certainly could. Is terrorism in fact necessary for change? – Generation X: The events of May ’68 marked a culmination of social unrest, but as “the middle children of history” does our generation have anything left for which to fight? Sources include: ‘Fight Club’- David Fincher, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’- Guy Debord, ‘Guy Debord and the Situationist International’- Tom McDonough, and ‘The Culture Industry- Theodor Adorno. Information from the Internet, magazines and newspapers will also be used to illustrate my project.
Tag: consumerism
Themes: • In this project I look at how advertising, marketing and consumerism rule our culture, and the effects of this on the individuals existing within this society. The effects on the individual’s life such as freedom, happiness and identity. • The majority of most of our lives is spent working in order to make money, to purchase consumables. Consumables have become the indicators of status, rather than leisure time, or rank at work. For example what car you drive and labels you wear has become of incredible importance. • We now build up our identities through what we consume, and find a sense of freedom in the consumer arena. We feel that we are free to buy what we want and make personal choices, when in fact we are brainwashed and seduced by advertising and the mass media. • Is the world in which we are living a reality? Have we become so obsessed with objects and image that we do not know our real desires or what real fulfilment is? Consumer fulfilment is just postponing the emptiness of our lives, which is why we continue to consume, to constantly fill this void. Sources: I shall focus on three main thinkers, two sociologists Bunting and Bauman and the philosopher Debord. I shall also be comparing these thinkers to other philosophers throughout. • Bunting: I shall look at her book Willing Slaves, How the Overwork Culture is Ruining our Lives. She examines how we as a culture work exhaustive hours in order to consume, this desire to consume is installed in us through the media, advertising and marketing. • Bauman: I shall mainly be looking as his book Identity, and how our society saturated with the media and advertising has a huge effect on our identities. • Debord: I shall be looking at his book Society of the Spectacle, in which he critiques our culture. I shall be investigating what he means by the spectacle, and how he suggests that the society in which we live is not real due to advertising and the media. Our society is fake in a sense, and we have lost contact with our true desires and selves.
Food goes along with sleep, water and recreation to formulate the fundamental necessaries we as humans need to survive. In most developed countries we have cultivated mechanisms and technologies that greatly improve the provision of food and this has given rise to experimentation with flavours and recipes that has produced a variety of tastes and delights. Within these countries eating has lost its association with need and has developed a new connotation with pleasure. Restaurants are just one of the industries that have been born of that pleasure, as we enter the beginnings of a still very young millennium, the changes and growth of the restaurant industry provides a vessel in which to explore the drive for consumption, the importance of the meal and society in its relation to culture. All this is amidst a backdrop of those country’s which still encounter the struggle for food and in many ways reflect the same picture of life from the beginning of the last millennium. Part One – Analysis of three restaurants in Leeds:- Anthony’s – Fine Dining; The Outside In – Family Restaurant / Nouvelle Cuisine; McDonald’s – Fast Food. Part Two – History of The Restaurant, Parisian Phenomena, Move to England and USA, Last 50 years – diet revolution. Part Three – McDonaldization of Society, Max Weber – Rationalisation, Mass Culture / Consumerism. Part Four – Food Technology, Martin Heidegger and Albert Borgmann – Technology, Healthier Attitudes – Slow Food. Key Texts – Heidegger – Question Concerning Technology, Eric Schlosser – Fast Food Nation, George Ritzer – The McDonaldization of Society, Rebecca Sprang – History of the Restaurant, Peter Davison – The Cultural Debate, Theodore Adorno – The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, Albert Borgmann – Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Alan Warde – Consumption, Food and Taste.
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.
Territory & Objectives: My project investigates the way in which we impose received value systems upon the world around us, and how those standards are also mapped upon the individual body as carrier of those principles of the dominant societal mode thus affecting our relationships with one another. It shows that living within the context of capitalism shapes the criteria of these docile evaluations, and demonstrates how this system of evaluation self-referentially recourses to fortify the capitalist social system through flux and change. Discussion will move on to consider in detail how locally received examples of information disseminated by globally operating media cartels act to coerce individuals’ lifestyle investment in the authority of the system. This will be orientated by the appraisal of lifestyle magazines, exploring how the discourses of desire within the grand schema of capitalism set standards of normative criteria which are employed in a self-policing system of adherence to what it means to be a good consumer. These various lifestyle aspects by various publications persuade the individual, critically disengaged, to regard themselves as the aspiring capitalist critically engaged in the labour of consumption and therefore active in the formation of their lives and their relationships with other people. Rather than promoting multi-cultural, inter-disciplinary engagement in the process of being, the imperative to consume, saturated throughout commercial repertoires, in fact causes and substantiates rival economies and inequalities between individuals, between factions and at the level of global market forces. Further, the effect of tying consumption, through advertising, to normative standards set, makes it almost impossible to recognise the specificity of an individual. Rather, we evaluate ourselves and others against normative standards which discourage empathy for our fellow man, a state of affairs which may have dire consequences. Finally then, this paper will suggest what possibilities remain for communication between us with a view to the reformation of a networked community in response to the alienation and apathy of the individual in high capitalism. Change: The way in which advertising has tied consumption to normative values which are themselves set with the imperative to consume in mind. The overall effect is to diminish greatly one’s scope for specificity, and to create conflicts of interest. Sources: Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality I: The Will to Knowledge, Penguin, 1998; Foucault, M., The Archaeology of Knowledge, Routledge 1994, Bristol; Foucault, M., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Gordon, C., Pantheon Books 1989, New York; Blanchot, M., Literature and the Right to Death, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, Station Hill Press 1999, Barrytown; Marx, K., Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Ed. McLellan, D., Oxford University Press 1977
Place: Advertising, or more specifically, questioning the assumption that the ‘success of advertising relies upon the ability to appeal to negative human emotion’. Aims and Objectives of My Project: • To initially establish where this assumption came from. • To briefly explain ‘why’ advertising was created in the first instance and ‘how’ it developed into the institution it has become today. • To identify the negative human emotions that advertising deals with. It is imperative to also demonstrate that playing on such emotions is the very intent of advertising, both on a theoretical and practical level. I will prove that from a personal point of view, and with reference to relevant case studies that advertising does work (on the grounds suggested). I will also address the possibility that the proof of successful advertising comes when an appeal to consumer ends is absent. • To acknowledge that there are incidents in, which negative human emotions actually cause advertising to fail. I must also consider the fact that advertising, in a sociological context, has subsided to consumerism in the twenty-first century. • To consider other possible reasons ‘why’ advertising is not quite as successful as the title of my project initially implies. • To attempt to align the thoughts of certain prominent philosophers with the existence of advertising i.e. to assess how the philosophers would respond to the fundamental workings of the industry as a whole. My focus here will particularly fall upon Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Montaigne, Epicurus, Locke and Husserl.
Abstraction: Imagine a supermarket with aisle upon aisle of purchasable goods appealing to each and every appetite, whim, or fancy. Purchasable for a limited time only, that is, until their ‘sell by date’ runs out, then the shelves are restocked and it is on to the freshest goods and the newest fads. In my project I will investigate whether this is an accurate and justifiable account of contemporary art, and if so, why? Section 1. Modernism, The Search for Ambrosia Enter the intellectual avant-garde, the revolutionaries, pioneers, map readers and guardians of high taste, searching for that which is guaranteed to satisfy. Transgressing old, outdated traditions and paving the way for a new and better future, waiting for the rest of society to follow suit. The Bitter Taste, The Crisis of Modernity: The failure of the artist as the modern hero but his/her brilliant success at becoming an icon. Political incompatibility, the dawning limits of the experimentation and exploration, and the absorption and assimilation of elitist avant-garde artwork by the mindless masses. There were no successful conversions; the artwork was absorbed while the ideologies behind them were not. Section 2. What is a Hot Dog?: Postmodernism, (…is elephant dung the secret ingredient?): Prepare yourself for a scandal. Virtual realities, simulation, canned culture, a schizophrenic way of life abundant in choice. The power in art is no longer found within its creations but the prices they command. Certain lengths are carried out by the artist in order to stand out in this overcrowded artistic stage and thus extend his/her shelf life. No battles, no obligations, no crusade, no spiritual journey, no brotherhood, no notion of linear progression. The task now is keeping fresh and well within your ‘sell by date’. ‘Back of the Net’ Objectives: 1. ‘Subsidence’: The Politics of Post, I shall investigate the ‘gradual shift’ that happened in the attitudes towards art in western civilisation during ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ in the twentieth century. 2. ‘Mirror Image?’: Reflections of Society, does in any way reflect society and if so, does it follow that because contemporary art is superficial that so too is society? Explore the connotations this might have. 3. GM Free: Commodification Verses Purity, was art always destined to become a commodity? Or was there any real possibility that it could be anything else? 4. When is ‘Shit’ really ‘Shit’?, investigate how defecation has become the marketable medium? The power of shock and the spectacle in a postmodern society. The necessity of extending the artists’ shelf life. Sources: The sources for this project are very extensive and include information obtained from the National Records Office in Kew, newspapers, galleries (specifically, Tate Modern, London, and the Baltic, Gateshead), a numerous amount of books (both from my personal collection and borrowed from libraries) and the World Wide Web. The Philosophical Anchor: In this essay I wish to break through the elusiveness of art and relate it with the human experience. The story of art can go some way in revealing or demonstrating the present human condition. I wish to jump over the partitioning rope, disregard the ‘Do Not Touch’, take the picture from the wall, turn the canvas around and read the ingredients on the back…
Objectives – Show how we became mass consumers for our mass production – Trace the role of the advert and media in safeguarding our ‘culture of consumption’ – Expose the inner workings and sinister nature of ‘the advert’ – Show our true relation to our ‘stuff’ ‘Texts’ used: David Harvey – The Condition of Postmodernity 2000 Pierre Martineau – Motivations in Advertising 1957 Jean Baudrillard – Selected Writings 2001 Roland Barthes – Mythologies 1973 Christopher Lasch – The Culture of Narcissism 1979 Umberto Eco – Travels in Hyper-reality 1986 David Collis – The Abuse of Consumerism 1999 Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle 1983 Milan Yaros – PHY288 Lecture Notes Naomi Klein – NoLogo 2001 Frederick Jameson–Postmodernism/The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 1991 Judith Williamson – Decoding Advertisements Douglas Holt – Postmodern Markets BBC Documentary (the name of which I have been unable to find out after only managing to record the middle of it!) Harvard Business review – July 1992 Sources used: Photograph of billboard taken 04/02 Adflip.com online poster advert archive Fiat enthusiasts club, advert archive ITV and Channel 4 television adverts Across the fields of psychology sociology, linguistics, semiotics and economics, this project shows how the advertising and mass media techniques have changed alongside the cultural paradigm shift that was postmodernity It shows our relation to the things we surround ourselves with and what they have come to mean to us Hopefully it will invoke a sense of concern about the abusive nature of our relation with our consumer society
To show how a world based and run on reason, deals with the un-reasonable, and keeps reason in the minds of the many. (Starting off looking at paradigm of how the views on life and madness evolved throughout the Age of Reason and in the Early Modernism period through to now and then moving in to a sociological thesis of part design history with philosophical interpretations concerning itself with our suspect, over corporate, multinational mindset times.) Part 1: Theory; Early Modernity’s Concept of Life Reduced to Reason and the Model of Madness. (Additional texts: Foucault’s ‘Madness and Civilisation’ and works of art relative to particular time to emphasise conclusions) Part 2: Society’s presentation of life as reason with no other alternative. Study looking at Klein’s text in ‘No Logo’ of application of marketing and end product of capitalist selling exposure upon the human psyche of life, reason and sanity giving the mob the need for money and the drive needed to earn it. Part 3: My generation. Examination of peers and show of self-perceptions and wants and intentions. Visual examples (photos of individuals and what is characterised as attractive within context of places, objects and life styles) Social attitudes (interviews concerned with thoughts on madness, society and destiny) Essentially, what I’m trying to do here, is show how the conception of madness that we have now came about and how it was used for the benefit of the government and for capitalism in its early days, against those individuals who didn’t want to ‘get with the program’. I’m then going to move to contemporary times and look at how through the judicious use of effectively marketing, today’s corporate giants are in effect doing the same thing, controlling the public through the images that they promote and label and either condone or don’t.