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2002 Abstracts Stage 2

You’d be mad not to

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.