Intro to Postmodernism for A2 Media Students

1. OCR Media Studies – A2
Critical Perspectives: themes

2. Critical Perspectives:
 ‘We Media’ and Democracy
 Media in the Online Age
 Postmodern Media
 Contemporary Media Regulation
 Media and the Collective Identity
 Global Media

3. Postmodern Media
Over the next term we will be studying the critical
perspective – Postmodern Media and looking at a
range of examples from different media to try to work
out what it is all about.
By the time you complete this section you will be able to
understand a range of theories relating to postmodern
media and will be able to apply those theories to
specific texts which we will have studied. You will be
tested on this critical perspective in the A2 exam and
the question may look something like this…

4. Unit G325: Critical Perspectives in Media –
Section B Contemporary Media Issues
Postmodern Media Specimen Questions
 Discuss two or more media texts that you
would define as ‘postmodern’ and explain
why you would give them this label. Cover
at least two media in your answer.
Or
 Consider the ways in which postmodern
media challenge conventional relations
between audience and text. Refer to at
least two media forms in your answer.

5. Back to the Beginning
 So now you know the outcomes lets
start at the beginning….
 Aim: To gain an understanding of
what the term ‘postmodern’ actually
means and how it relates to a range
of media texts.

6. Dictionary Definition of
Postmodernism
The Compact Oxford English Dictionary
refers to postmodernism as quot;a style
and concept in the arts characterized
by a distrust of theories and
ideologies and by the drawing of
attention to conventions.quot;

7. Postmodern Media
An Introduction from the Media Studies Text Book
OCR Media Studies for A2 – Julian McDougall
Postmodernists claim that in a media-
saturated world, where we are constantly
immersed in media, 24/7 – and on the
move, at work, at home – the distinction
between reality and the media
representation of it becomes blurred or
even entirely invisible to us. In other
words, we no longer have any sense of the
difference between real things and images
of them, or real experiences and
simulations of them. Media reality is the
new reality.

8. Some see this as a historical development: the
modern period came before, during which
artists experimented with the representation
of reality, and the postmodern comes
next, where this idea of representation gets
‘remixed’, played around with, through
pastiche, parody and intertextual references
– where the people that make texts
deliberately expose their nature as
constructed texts and make no attempt to
pretend that they are ‘realist’.

9. Others say that postmodernism is just a new way of
thinking about media, when really it has always been
this way. One of these is Strinati (An Introduction to
Theories of Popular Culture 2005:224)
The mass media…were once thought of as holding up a
mirror to, and thereby reflecting, a wider social reality.
Now that reality is only definable in terms of the surface
reflections of that mirror. It is no longer a question of
distortion since the term implies that there is a reality,
outside the surface simulations of the media, which can
be distorted, and this is basically what is at issue.

10. Postmodern Ideas
Postmodern media rejects the idea that
any media product or text is of any
greater value than another. All
judgements are merely taste.
Anything can be art, anything can
deserve to reach an audience, and
culture ‘eats itself’ as there is no
longer anything new to produce or
distribute.

11. Cont.
The distinction between media and reality has
collapsed, and we know live in a ‘reality’
defined by images and representations – a
state of simulacrum. Images refer to each
other and represent each other as reality
rather than some ‘pure’ reality that exists
before the image represents it – this is the
state of hyperreality.

12. Cont.
All ideas of ‘the truth’ are just
competing claims – or discourses –
and what we believe to be the truth
at any point is merely the ‘winning’
discourse.

13. Philosophers within the Postmodern
Movement
 Baudrillard and Lyotard (not to be confused
with the outfit you wear for gymnastics!)
Both men are now deceased but during
their life they offered different theories of
what postmodernism was.
 What they shared was a belief that the idea
of truth needs to be ‘deconstructed’ so that
we can challenge the dominant ideas that
people claim as truth, which Lyotard
describes as ‘grand narratives’.

14. Postmodern Theories cont.
In the postmodern world, media texts
make visible and challenge ideas of
truth and reality, removing the
illusion that stories, texts or images
can ever accurately or neutrally
reproduce reality or truth. So we get
the idea that there are always
competing versions of the truth and
reality, and postmodern media
products will engage with this idea.

15. Critics of these theories and beliefs
 It is important to understand that many people see
Baudrillard and Lyotard’s views as offensive and hard
to reconcile with their belief systems.
 It can be seen as a whimsical luxury to question and
play with the idea of truth and something that people
who live in countries such as Iraq, Tibet and
Zimbabwe cannot do – they have to contest on a daily
basis the existence of truth, justice and human rights.
 Some people also find the idea of rejecting their
‘grand narrative’ goes against their whole religious
beliefs and moral principles.

16. Hyperreality and Baudrillard – Julian McDougall
OCR Media Text Book
You should be familiar with the basic
semiotic ideas – that signs represent
ideas, people or places. For
Baudrillard, there is only the surface
meaning; there is no longer any
‘original’ thing for a sign to represent
– the sign is the meaning. We inhabit
a society made up wholly of simulacra
– simulations of reality which replace
any ‘pure’ reality.

17. McDougall Cont.
‘Pure’ reality is thus replaced by the
hyperreal where any boundary
between the real and the imaginary is
eroded. Baudrillard’s work is an
attempt to expose the ‘open secret’
that this is how we live and make
sense of the world in postmodern
times. As you can imagine, he is
considered a pretty controversial
philosopher.

18. Baudrillard – A Postmodern
Philosopher (1929-2007)
Baudrillard wrote a philosophical treatise
called ‘Simulacra and Simulation’
Simulacra and Simulation is most known
for its discussion of images, signs, and
how they relate to the present day.
Baudrillard claims that modern society
has replaced all reality and meaning
with symbols and signs, and that the
human experience is of a simulation of
reality rather than reality itself.

19. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to
are signs of culture and media that
create the perceived reality;
Baudrillard believed that society has
become so reliant on simulacra that it
has lost contact with the real world
on which the simulacra are based.

20. Simulacra and Simulation
Simulacra and Simulation identifies three types of simulacra
and identifies each with a historical period:
 First order
associated with the pre-modern period, where the image is
clearly an artificial placemarker for the real item.
 Second order
associated with the industrial Revolution, where distinctions
between image and reality break down due to the
proliferation of mass-produced copies. The item's ability
to imitate reality threatens to replace the original
version.
 Third order
associated with the postmodern age, where the simulacrum
precedes the original and the distinction between reality
and representation breaks down. There is only the
simulacrum.

21. Baudrillard theorizes the lack of distinctions
between reality and simulacra originates in
several phenomena:
 Contemporary media including television, film, print
and the Internet, which are responsible for blurring
the line between goods that are needed and goods for
which a need is created by commercial images.
 Exchange value, in which the value of goods is based
on money rather than usefulness.
 Multinational capitalism, which separates produced
goods from the plants, minerals and other original
materials and the processes used to create them.
 Urbanization, which separates humans from the
natural world.
 Language and ideology, in which language is used to
obscure rather than reveal reality when used by
dominant, politically powerful groups

22. Baudrillard’s Famous Assertion…
Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that
it is the ‘real’ country, all of real
America, which is Disneyland (just as
prisons are there to conceal the fact that
it is the social; in its entirety, it its banal
omnipresence, which is Carceral).
Banal = commonplace
Omnipresence = present everywhere
Carceral = A Carceral state is a state
modelled on the idea of a prison

23. He goes on to say…
That Disneyland (with its Pirates, Frontier, and
Future World fantasy set-ups)
is presented as imaginary in order to make us
believe that the rest is real, when in fact all
of Los Angeles and the America
surrounding it are no longer real, but of the
order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It
is no longer a question of a false
representation of reality (ideology), but of
concealing the fact that the real is no
longer real, and thus of saving the reality
principle.

24. The Disneyland imaginary is neither true
nor false; it is a deterrence machine
set up in order to rejuvenate in
reverse the fiction of the real.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (1983)

25. With such reasoning, he characterised the
present age — following Ludwig
Feuerbach and Guy Debord — as one of
quot;hyperrealityquot; where the real object has
been effaced or superseded, by the
signs of its existence. Such an
assertion — the one for which he is most
criticised — is typical of his quot;fatal
strategyquot; of attempting to push his
theories of society beyond themselves.

26. Rather than saying, that our hysteria
surrounding pedophilia is such that we
no longer really understand what
childhood is anymore, Baudrillard
argued that quot;the Child no longer existsquot;.
Similarly, rather than arguing — as did
Susan Sontag in her book On
Photography — that the notion of reality
has been complicated by the profusion
of images of it, Baudrillard asserted:
quot;the real no longer existsquot;.

27. Postmodern Media Texts
There are many examples of texts or
products which deliberately set out to
explore and play with this state of
hyperreality. These texts are said to
be intertextual and self-referential –
they break the rules of realism to
explore the nature of their own status
as constructed texts. In other
words, they seek not to represent
reality, but to present media reality.

28. Examples We Will Look At
 Televised images of the 911 attacks on the World Trade
Center
 The Matrix and Blade Runner
 The music of DJ Shadow
 An advert for Cadbury
 The films of Michael Winterbottom, the Coen brothers,
and Wong Kar-wai
 Postmodern TV such as Big Brother; The Mighty Boosh;
the television of Ricky Gervais; The Wire and Echo
Beach/Moving Wallpaper
 Postmodern magazine readers
 Grand Theft Auto as a postmodern video game
 Second Life as the ultimate hyperreal media experience

29. Postmodern Film
We will begin our investigation of
postmodern media texts looking at a
selection of films which are thought
to reflect the ideas of
postmodernism

30. Postmodern Film
Postmodernist film can be seen to voice
the ideas of postmodernism through the
cinematic medium. Postmodernist film
upsets the mainstream conventions of
narrative structure and characterization
and destroys (or, at least, toys with) the
audience's suspension of disbelief to
create a work in which a less-
recognizable internal logic forms the
film's means of expression.

31. By making small but significant changes
to the conventions of cinema, the
artificiality of the experience and the
world presented are emphasised in the
audience's mind in order to remove
them from the conventional emotional
link they have to the subject matter,
and to give them a new view of it.

32. An example is Michael Winterbottom's 24
Hour Party People in which the character
based on Tony Wilson frequently breaks
out of the constructed world of the film
and talks directly to the audience
straight through the camera lens.
Jarring in effect, it suggests the
characters' pre-occupation with breaking
free of the cultural and economic
constructions of the world they live in.

33. Winterbottom's postmodernist effect, however, is
hardly new: Federico Fellini, among other
master filmmakers, used it memorably in
Satyricon (1969) and Amarcord (1973).
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) exploits
postmodernist aesthetics to an unusual degree
while Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is
considered an example of Postmodernist film
because of a range of techniques used.

34. The Matrix – A Postmodern Film?

35. We are going to watch ‘The Matrix’ and try
to pick out aspects of the film which make
it a postmodern film.
Think about:
 the narrative structure
 the idea of changing established
conventions
 Drawing the viewers attention to the
construction of the film – ‘bullet time’
sequences
 Taking existing ideas from earlier films
and using them in a different way –
paying homage
 Suggestions it makes about society and
its troubles

36. The Matrix
The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction-
action film written and directed by
Larry and Andy Wachowski
and starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence
Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe
Pantoliano, and Hugo Weaving.
It was first released in the USA on
March 31, 1999, and is the first entry
in The Matrix series of
films, comics, video games, and
animation.

37. Box Office Info
 It earned $171 million in the U.S. and $460
million worldwide, and later became the first
DVD to sell more than three million copies in
the U.S.
 The Ultimate Matrix Collection was released on
HD DVD on May 22, 2007 and on Blu-ray on
October 14, 2008.
 The movie is also scheduled to be released
stand alone in a 10th anniversary edition on
Blu-ray in the Digibook format on March
31, 2009, 10 years to the day after the movie
was released theatrically.

38.  The Matrix was a co-production of Warner
Bros. Studios and Australian Village Roadshow
Pictures, and all but a few scenes were filmed
at Fox Studios in Sydney, Australia, and in the
city itself.
 Recognizable landmarks were not included in
order to maintain the setting of a generic
American city. Nevertheless, the Sydney
Harbour Bridge, Anzac bridge, AWA Tower,
Martin Place and a Commonwealth Bank
branch are visible in some shots, as is signage
on buildings for the Sydney offices of Telstra
and IBM Corporation among others.

39. Other clues remain, such as the sign next to the
elevator in the famed lobby scene reading quot;do
not use lift during fire.quot; (as opposed to
elevator); and the quot;Authorised Personnel Onlyquot;
sign (American spelling would be Authorized
Personnel Only) on the door of the rooftop of
the building where Morpheus was kept. In
addition, in some scenes, traffic flow on the left
hand side can be observed, which is another
give-away for the filming location.

40. In Postmodern thought, interpretations of
The Matrix often reference Baudrillard's
philosophy to demonstrate that the
movie is an allegory for contemporary
experience in a heavily
commercialized, media-driven
society, especially of the developed
countries. This influence was brought to
the public's attention through the
writings of art historians such as
Griselda Pollock and film theorists such
as Heinz-Peter Schwerfel.

41. The Wachowski Brothers were keen that
all involved understood the thematic
background of the movie. For
example, the book used to conceal
disks early in the movie, Simulacra
and Simulation, a 1981 work by the
French philosopher Jean
Baudrillard, was required reading for
most of the principal cast and crew.

42.  The Matrix makes many connections to Simulacra
and Simulation. In an early scene, Simulacra and
Simulation is the book in which Neo hides his illicit
software. In the film, the chapter 'On Nihilism' is in
the middle, rather than the end of the book.
 Morpheus also refers to the real world outside of
the Matrix as the quot;desert of the realquot;, which was
directly referenced in the Slavoj Žižek
work, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. In the
original script, Morpheus referenced Baudrillard's
book specifically.
 Keanu Reeves was asked by the directors to read
the book, as well as Out of Control and Evolution
Psychology, before being cast as Neo.

43. Merrin – Baudrillard and the Media
(2005:131)
The Matrix has us. Our consumption of the
films, the merchandise, and the world and
myth the Wachowskis sell us, and our
collective orgasm over the effects and
phones, guns, shades and
leather, represent our integration into the
virtuality it promotes. The Matrix became a
viral meme spreading through and being
mimetically (mimicked i.e. copied) and
absorbed into modern culture, extending
our virtualisation.

44. Merrin cont.
Just as the film offered the stark choice of
being inside or outside the matrix so you
were either inside or outside the zeitgeist
(the spirit of the times). To paraphrase
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. As
Baudrillard makes clear, however, its fans
and public are caught in a similarly invisible
matrix that is far greater than depicted in
the film, and that the film itself is part of
and extends.

45. Other Postmodern Influences
The film describes a future in which reality
perceived by humans is actually the Matrix: a
simulated reality created by sentient machines
in order to pacify and subdue the human
population while their bodies' heat and
electrical activity are used as an energy source.
Upon learning this, computer programmer
quot;Neoquot; is drawn into a rebellion against the
machines. The film contains many references
to the cyberpunk and hacker subcultures;
philosophical and religious ideas; and homages
to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Hong
Kong action cinema and Spaghetti Westerns.

46. Challenging Film Making Conventions
The film is known for popularizing the use of a visual effect known
as quot;bullet timequot;, which allows the viewer to explore a moment
progressing in slow-motion as the camera appears to orbit
around the scene at normal speed.
One proposed technique for creating these effects involved
propelling a high speed camera along a fixed track with a
rocket to capture the action as it occurred. However, this was
discarded as unfeasible, because not only was the destruction
of the camera in the attempt all but inevitable, but the camera
would also be almost impossible to control at such speeds.
Instead, the method used was a technically expanded version
of an old art photography technique known as time-slice
photography, in which a large number of cameras are placed
around an object and triggered nearly simultaneously.

47.  The evolution of photogrametric and image-
based computer-generated background
approaches in The Matrix's bullet time shots
set the stage for later innovations unveiled in
the sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The
Matrix Revolutions. Virtual Cinematography
(CGI-rendered characters, locations, and
events) and the high-definition quot;Universal
Capturequot; process completely replaced the use
of still camera arrays, thus more closely
realizing the quot;virtual cameraquot;.
 This film overcame the release of Star Wars
Episode I: The Phantom Menace by winning the
Academy Award for Visual Effects

48. Half-Term Homework
Discuss the concept of postmodernism
as you understand it so far, and link
your ideas to
The Matrix to show how it can be read
as a postmodern film.
You should write about one to two sides
of A4
This is due in on Monday 8th June