Independent Research

Postmodernism in Blade Runner - A Full In depth Analysis

In responding to a statement such as Harvey's, one is faced with the daunting task of entering into and exploring a wide and complex range of discourses that criss-cross, intersect and imbricate themselves, and, in so doing, create the two principle discourse ‘spaces’ known as postmodernity and postmodernism. 

 http://faculty.washington.edu/thurlow/research/bladerunner.html

 Postmodernism in Blade Runner -  An Analysis
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is a film that explores contemporary theories of the postmodern. The film explores, through the detective figure Deckard, questions of authenticity. An aspect of postmodernity is the loss of faith in traditional meta-narratives [meta-narratives are the overarching stories that explains and legitimises knowledge or belief. Some traditional meta-narratives are Christianity, Communism and Scientific progress]. Questioning or losing faith in these narratives means that the individual inquires about their own subjectivity; and is left with no system of authentication. History, or how we have become to be, is a meta-narrative that is questioned explicitly in Blade Runner. History is a narrative which tends to explain events as linear, every event has its cause and affect; eras come one after another in dialectical progress. Even though in reality the change of era and cause of events are not easily understood the narrative of History constructs and validates a reality of existence which is understandable and rational.

http://ardfilmjournal.wordpress.com/2008/08/26/blade-runner-and-the-postmodern-use-of-mise-en-scene/

Postmodernism - A Detailed Analysis

Bauldrillard Introduction - What does he say?

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French philosopher and cultural analyst who started his academic life as a Marxist sociologist interested in consumer society (he completed his Ph.D. thesis in 1966). He concluded that what was formerly a society of production had now (after World War II) become one of consumption.

Becoming slowly dissatisfied with Marxism, he went on to incorporate structuralism and semiology into his analysis, seeing the objects we consume as a system of signs that had to be decoded, this system being embedded in structures of consumption and leisure that he felt could be analysed sociologically. He laid out his semiotic analysis of consumer society in his books The System of Objects (1968), The Consumer Society (1970), and The Mirror of Production (1975). His most important earlier work is For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), in which he rejected Marxism as the only valid way of analysing consumer society.

Marx said that objects all have a "use value": for example, a hammer is useful for hammering nails into a board. But under capitalism, all objects are reduced to their "exchange value," their value or price in the marketplace (the hammer might cost $10 in the local hardware store). Baudrillard said, so far, so good; but he added that, at least in advanced capitalist counties, consumer goods also have a sign exchange value: they are signs of distinction, taste, and social status. A BMW or a gold watch can certainly have both use and exchange value (we can drive the BMW to work, or sell the watch to a used jewellery dealer); but, says Baudrillard, we also have to understand their status as signs in the code of consumer values - they signify social distinction. As you drive your BMW down the main street, you're saying to the unwashed masses "I'm no longer one of you - I'm distinct, a member of the wealthy and discriminating classes." It's the BMW's symbolic value, it's cachet, that makes it so irresistible to these classes. Lastly, Baudrillard imagined a utopian realm where we all engage in symbolic exchange, where the gifts we give cease to be consumer objects with exchange or sign values, becoming instead symbols of friendship, love, or community. 

http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/baudrillard1.htm 

Postmodernism; "What is postmodernism?"

10 ideas for consideration
So how does one "do news" for postmodernists? In my opinion, the following ideas are open for discussion:

1. Firstly, there IS no news except television (better: "video") news. Pomos want to see and hear for themselves, not read about it from a distance.
2. News must be available 24/7. Gone are the days when people will tune in at a specific time to be "given" the news.
3. There’s no such thing as a newscast in a postmodernist world. Stories must be available simultaneously, with the viewer able to select at random. Pomos don’t believe they should have to wait for anything.
4. News must not be afraid to present the absurdities and contradictions of life as parts of the reality of a multi-cultural, diverse world.
5. News must include everybody’s perspective, identify the organization’s own perspective, or give none at all. The artificial journalistic hegemony known as objectivity is dead. It never was real and Pomos see through it.
6. News must give up its obsession with stardom and celebrity. Postmodernists reject authority and elitism (newscasters and reporters) in favor of participation and the knowledge acquired therein.
7. Reporters could and perhaps should represent the various tribes. This would provide sort of a global view from which viewers could pick and choose. "Now what?" is an important question for postmodernists, but only insofar as they can make up their own minds.
8. "Live" is hypercritical, for the Pomo wants to participate more than anything else.
9. News must be interactive, but the goal is participation, not driving viewers to goals or solutions.
10. I believe it’s time for TV stations to spin their news departments out as wholly owned subsidiary companies and permit them to seek their own distribution outlets. Create a licensing arrangement with the parent company for broadcast rights, and let the laws of the market determine who continues and who doesn’t. Despite their similarities, broadcasters are not Web people, because their interests conflict. Consequently, TV stations only play with the Internet, and in so doing, they miss the point of the technology. They also deny and ignore the primary conduit to the whole postmodernist movement. It will stay that way unless the news becomes its own master, complete with the option to decide how best to distribute its product.

http://www.thepomoblog.com/papers/pomo.htm


Postmodernism; "Postmodernism is Dead"

I have some good news—kick back, relax, enjoy the rest of the summer, stop worrying about where your life is and isn’t heading. What news? Well, on 24th September, we can officially and definitively declare that postmodernism is dead. Finished. History. A difficult period in human thought over and done with. How do I know this? Because that is the date when the Victoria and Albert Museum opens what it calls “the first comprehensive retrospective” in the world: “Postmodernism—Style and Subversion 1970-1990.”

If there’s one word that confuses, upsets, angers, beleaguers, exhausts and contaminates us all, then it is postmodernism. And yet, properly understood, postmodernism is playful, intelligent, funny and fascinating. From Grace Jones to Lady Gaga, from Andy Warhol to Gilbert and George, from Paul Auster to David Foster Wallace, its influence has been everywhere and continues. It has been the dominant idea of our age.

So what was it? Well, the best way to begin to understand postmodernism is with reference to what went before: modernism. Unlike, say, the Enlightenment or Romanticism, postmodernism (even as a word) summons up the movement it intends to overturn. In this way, postmodernism might be seen as the delayed germination of an older seed, planted by artists like Marcel Duchamp, during modernism’s high noon of the 1920s and 1930s. (Seen in this light, the start-date that the V&A offers for postmodernism—1970—is quite late.)

In the beginning, postmodernism was not merely ironical, merely gesture, some kind of clever sham, a hotchpotch for the sake of it. It became these things later in lesser works by lesser artists: Michael Nyman, Takashi Murakami, Tracey Emin and Jonathan Safran Foer. Rather, in the beginning artists, philosophers, linguists, writers and musicians were bound up in a movement of great force that sought to break with the past, and which did so with great energy. A new and radical permissiveness was the result. Postmodernism was a high-energy revolt, an attack, a strategy for destruction. It was a set of critical and rhetorical practices that sought to destabilise the modernist touchstones of identity, historical progress and epistemic certainty.

Above all, it was a way of thinking and making that sought to strip privilege from any one ethos and to deny the consensus of taste. Like all the big ideas, it was an artistic tendency that grew to take on social and political significance. As Ihab Hassan, the Egyptian-American philosopher, has said, there moved through this (our) period “a vast will to un-making, affecting the body politic, the body cognitive, the erotic body, the individual psyche, the entire realm of discourse in the west.”

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/postmodernism-is-dead-va-exhibition-age-of-authenticism/

 A List of Postmodern Film
I found this list very useful as it lists a large number of postmodern films

http://www.imdb.com/list/RU5EhnPspDI/

Scream - A Postmodern Film

Shrek - A Postmodern Film

Postmodern - A Further Description and Analysis

Looper

This is a film that has just been released  that is considered to be postmodern, and I plan to see it in a weeks time

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276104/