"Non Magical Realism"             & "Hyper Reflexivity"

ISE Sunday May 1rst afternoon talk: Douglas Kelley, "Lurching Towards A Wholly New Discourse: Two New Theories, "Non Magical Realism" and "Hyper Reflexivity." Part one, "Non Magical Realism", Sunday May 1st, 3:30-5:30 pm and Part two, "Hyper Reflexivity.", Saturday May 14th, to 2:30-530 pm ET both at ISE Cultural Foundation, 555 Broadway, Basement Floor, Betw Prince/Spring, 2:30-5:30

Douglas Kelley, founder of the DKS, as well as artist, entertainer, and sometimes self-styled would be public intellectual, statesman and cultural commentator.

Perhaps the easiest way to make your writing more encyclopedic is to write about what people believe, rather than what is so. If this strikes you as somehow subjectivist or collectivist or imperialist, then ask me about it, because I think that you are just mistaken. What people believe is a matter of objective fact, and we can present that quite easily from the neutral point of view.-- Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia founder


Magic realism (or magical realism) is a literary genre in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realist setting. The term was coined in the 1920s by a German art critic to describe certain American paintings (see History below), but it is most often associated with the Latin American literary boom of the twentieth century, marked by the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez in 1967, which is considered the seminal magical realist text. Magical realism can be detected in the supernatural tales of E.T.A. Hoffman, which are related in the down-to-earth tone of confessional journalism. Magical realism may be viewed as more than a specific historical-geographical literary movement; it is an element of style that can be located in a large variety of novels, poetry, painting, and even film.

Common aspects of magical realist novels

The following elements are found in many magical realist novels, but not all are found in each novel and many are found in novels that fall under other genres.

Relation to other genres and movements

As a literary style, magical realism often overlaps or is confused with other genres and movements.

History

The term magic realism was first used by the German art critic Franz Roh to describe the unusual realism of primarily American painters such as Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker and other artists during the 1920s, under whom traditional realism became subtly infused with overtones of the surreal and fantastical. The term grew popular in the 20th century with the rise of such authors as Mikhail Bulgakov, Ernst Jünger, and many Latin American writers, most notably Jorge Luis Borges,Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, who confessed, "My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic." The most widely read of the South American magical realism narratives is García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The term was first revived and applied to the realm of fiction in the 1960s by a Venezuelan essayist and critic Arturo Uslar-Pietri, who applied it to a very specific South American genre; it only came in vogue after Nobel prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias used the expression to define the style of his novels. Today, magical realism is perhaps too broadly used, to characterize all realistic fictions with an eerie, otherworldly component, such as the tales of Edgar Allen Poe.

Painting

In painting, magical realism is a term often used interchangeably with post-expressionism. In 1925, art critic Franz Roh used this term to describe painting which signalled a return to realism after expressionism's extravagances which sought to redesign objects to reveal the spirits of those objects. Magical realism, according to Roh, instead faithfully portrays the exterior of an object, and in doing so the spirit, or magic, of the object reveals itself.

Other important aspects of magical realist painting, according to Roh, include:

External links to magical realist paintings

Magical Realist Painting and Franz Roh (http://www.uh.edu/~englmi/gallery.php?mygal=franzRoh&title=Magical%20Realist%20Painting%20and%20Franz%20Roh)

Habitus

In post-structuralist thought, habitus, a concept defined by Pierre Bourdieu, is the total ideational environment of a person. This includes the person's beliefs and dispositions, and prefigures everything that that person may choose to do. The concept of habitus challenges the concept of free will, in that within a certain habitus at any one time, choices are not limitless—here are limited dispositions, or readinesses for action. A person is not an automaton, for there exists flexibility in a habitus, but neither is there complete free will.

A large part of the concept of habitus is that it brings attention to the fact that there are limitless options for action that a person would never think of, and therefore those options don't really exist as possibilities. In normal social situations, a person relies upon a large store of scripts and a large store of knowledge, which present that person with a certain picture of the world and how she or he thinks to behave within it.

A person's habitus cannot be fully known to the person, as it exists largely within the realm of the unconscious and includes things as visceral as body movements and postures, and it also includes the most basic aspects of thought and knowledge about the world, including about the habitus itself.


Unconscious mind

The unconscious mind (or subconscious) is the aspect (or puported aspect) of the mind of which we are not directly conscious or aware.

The unconscious mind should not be confused with "being unconscious" and unconsciousness which is loss of consciousness.

History

The idea originated in antiquity, and its more modern history is detailed in Henri F Ellenberger's Discovery of the Unconscious (Basic Books, 1970).

Certain philosophers preceding Sigmund Freud such as Leibniz and Schopenhauer developed ideas foreshadowing the subconscious. The new medical science of psychoanalysis established by Freud and his disciples popularized this and similar notions such as the role of the libido (sex drive) and the self-destructive urge of thanatos (death wish), and the famous Oedipus complex wherein a son seeks to "kill" his father to make love to his own mother.

The term was popularized by Freud. He developed the idea that there were layers to human consciousness: the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. He thought that certain psychic events take place "below the surface", or in the unconscious mind. A good example is dreaming, which Freud called the "royal road to the unconscious".

In another of Freud's systematizations, the mind is divided into the Conscious mind or Ego and two parts of the Unconscious: the Id or instincts and the Superego. Freud used the idea of the unconscious in order to explain certain kinds of neurotic behavior. (See psychoanalysis.)

Many modern philosophers and social scientists either dispute the concept of an unconscious, or argue that it is not an entity that can be scientifically investigated or discussed rationally. In the social sciences, this view was first brought forward by John Watson, considered to be the first American behaviourist. Among philosophers, Karl Popper was one of Freud's most notable contemporary opponents. Popper claimed that Freud's theory of the unconscious was not falsifiable.

However, there is agreement among many, perhaps most, psychologists and cognitive scientists that much mental functioning takes place in a part of the mind inaccessible to consciousness.

Carl Jung developed the concept further. He divided the unconscious into two parts: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The first of these corresponds to Freud's idea of the subconscious, though unlike his mentor, Jung believed that the personal unconscious contained a valuable counter-balance to the conscious mind, as well as childish urges. As for the collective unconscious, which consists of archetypes, this is the common store of mental building blocks that makes up the psyche of all humans. Evidence for its existence is the universality of certain symbols that appear in the mythologies of nearly all peoples.

There are other views. Jane Roberts (in the Seth books) presents a rich portrait of consciousness in which the unconscious mind is described as being clairvoyant and in communication with all other minds. The self that each of us experiences day-to-day is described as being but one facet of a richer and very complex multi-dimensional entity.

Terminology

Somewhat related to the unconscious are nonconscious psychic events. The term nonconscious seems to be used in various ways – some appear to use the term to avoid the somewhat value-laden term “unconscious” or “subconscious” (but basically for the same purpose); some use it to refer to events that can only be observed indirectly (e.g. certain acts of short-term memory); some use it to point to events such as brain activity controlled mostly by the autonomic nervous system (e.g. emotional reactions to certain smells). Not surprisingly, there are no sharply delineated conventions for distinguishing exactly between the nonconscious and the unconscious – partly because they interact with each other, and partly because, as is so often the case, psychologists are unable to agree on the definitions.

A distinction needs to be made between The Unconscious (or the unconscious mind, or the subconscious), which are concepts in psychoanalysis and related fields, and unconscious or nonconscious events in the mind, which are of great interest in cognition and perception. There are connections and similarities between the two but it would be quite wrong to use these two concepts interchangeably.

Unconscious mental processes

(Note: The next section does confuse the two but has not been removed because of the interesting examples that it gives)

The unconscious is arguably not the most intuitive idea, so why bother with it? What's the evidence? What might the unconscious explain?

The other or constitutive other is a key concept in psychology and philosophy where it is often considered to be what defines or even constitutes the self (see self (psychology), self (philosophy), and self-concept) and other phenomena and cultural units: "What appear to be cultural units--human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations--are maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization. Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or 'other' through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is 'privileged' or favored, and the other is devalued in some way." (Cahoone 1996). Emmanuel Levinas, on the other hand, saw apprehension of the other as the basis for ethics, and as a limit on ontology.

The poet Arthur Rimbaud may be the earliest to express this idea: "Je est un autre" [I is other]. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science phrased it thus: "You are always a different person." Ferdinand de Saussure described language as, in Calvin Thomas' words, a "differential system without positive terms". Jacques Lacan argued that ego-formation occurs through mirror-stage misrecognition, and his theories where applied to politics by Althusser. Also see Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler. (Thomas 2000)

According to Warner (1990) "the modern system of sex and gender would not be possible without a disposition to interpret the difference between genders as the difference between self and Other...having a sexual object of the opposite gender is taken to be the normal and paradigmatic form of an interest in the Other or, more generally, others." Thus according to Warner Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis hold the heterosexist view that if one is attracted to people of the same gender as one's self one fails to distinguish self and other, identification and desire, and is "regressive" or an "arrested" function. He further argues that heteronormativity covers its own narcissist investments by projecting or displacing them on queerness

Hysterical realism, also called recherché postmodernism or maximalism is a literary genre characterized by chronic length, manic characters, madding action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story.

The term hysterical realism was coined by James Wood in an essay on Zadie Smith's White Teeth, titled "The Smallness of the 'Big' Novel: Human, All Too Inhuman", which appeared in the July 17, 2000 issue of The New Republic and was later reprinted in Wood's 2004 book, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. Wood used the term to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues vitality "at all costs". In response, Zadie Smith described hysterical realism as a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth. . . "

Candidates for inclusion in the genre include: Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon,

Anti-Freudianism

Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism which, in method, concept, theory or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalytic reading has been practiced since the early development of psychoanalysis itself, and has developed into a rich and heterogeneous interpretive tradition.

Freud himself wrote several important essays on literature, which he used to explore the psyche of authors and characters, to explain narrative mysteries, and to develop new concepts in psychoanalysis (for instance, Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva). His sometime disciples and later readers, such as Carl Jung and later Jacques Lacan, were avid readers of literature as well, and used literary examples as illustrations of important concepts in their work (for instance, Lacan argued with Jacques Derrida over the interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter").

The object of psychoanalytic literary criticism, at its very simplest, can be the psychoanalysis of the author or of a particularly interesting character. In this directly therapeutic form, it is very similar to psychoanalysis itself, closely following the analytic interpretive process discussed in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. But many more complex variations are possible. The concepts of psychoanalysis can be deployed with reference to the narrative or poetic structure itself, without requiring access to the authorial psyche (an interpretation motivated by Lacan's remark that "the unconscious is structured like a language"). Or the founding texts of psychoanalysis may themselves be treated as literature, and re-read for the light cast by their formal qualities on their theoretical content (Freud's texts frequently resemble detective stories, or the archaeological narratives of which he was so fond).

Genre studies is a structuralist approach to literary criticism, film criticism and other cultural criticism. It looks at the structural elements that combine in the telling of a story and find patterns in collections of stories. When these elements (or codes) begin to carry inherent information, a genre is emerging. A simple example of this is a Western movie where two men face each other on a dusty and empty road; one dons a black hat, the other white. Independent of any external meaning, there is no way to tell what the situation might mean, but due to the long development of the Western genre, it is clearn to the audience that it is a gunfight showdown between a good guy and a bad guy.

It has been suggested that genres resonate with people because of the familiarity, the short-hand communication, as well as nature of genres to shift with public mores. Many have considered genre storytelling as lesser forms of art because of the heavily borrowed nature of the conventions. However, admiration has grown. Proponents argue that the genius of an effective genre piece is in the variation, combinations, and evolution of the codes.

Genre studies has perhaps gained the most recognition in cinema theory, where it directly contrasts with the auteur theory of film criticism.

Neuroesthetics is a rapidly growing subdiscipline of neuroscience seeking to explain and understand the esthetics of domains such as art and music on a neurological basis. The field was pioneered by Semir Zeki of the University College London. Neuroesthetics directs attention to the bodily structure and response of an organism in an encounter with esthetic phenomenon such as art. Tools such as brain imaging and genetic analysis contribute to developing neuroesthetic knowledge.


A historical example of neuroesthetic interest is the reception of Byzantine portraits in the Babur empire under the rulership of Akbar [1] (http://www.galbithink.org/sense-s3.htm#recept). Byzantine portraits differed from Babur art of that time in a neurologically important way: the Byzantine portraits presented a large central figure making strong eye contact with the viewer. Across a wide range of organisms, direct eye contact is an assertion of presence hardwired into organisms through the social context of evolution. Byzantine portraits' novel artistic stimulation of this response helps to account for their sensational effects within the artistically advanced Babur empire.



Auteur


The term auteur (French for author) is used to describe film directors who are considered to be artists with their own unique vision. The style of an auteur is recognisable in his/her films regardless of their genre and subject matter. However, this style does not need to be purely visual—any unique point-of-view or obsession could be considered the mark of an auteur. It is more a stamp of the director's personality that marks a body of work as that of an auteur.

Some directors work in only one genre, and are still seen as auteurs (hence the somewhat derogatory phrases, schlock-auteur and horror-auteur, for those who work exclusively in those genres).

A director may of course be talented without being an auteur; directors such as Michael Curtiz and John Huston were great filmmakers but they are not usually considered auteurs because they did not have a recognisable style that appeared in all their films.
Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative

By Wendy B. Faris

Ordinary Enchantments investigates magical realism as the most important trend in contemporary international fiction, defines its characteristics and narrative techniques, and proposes a new theory to explain its significance. In the most comprehensive critical treatment of this literary mode to date, Wendy B. Faris discusses a rich array of examples from magical realist novels around the world, including the work not only of Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but also of authors like Salman Rushdie, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, and Ben Okri.

Faris argues that by combining realistic representation with fantastic elements so that the marvelous seems to grow organically out of the ordinary, magical realism destabilizes the dominant form of realism based on empirical definitions of reality, gives it visionary power, and thus constitutes what might be called a "remystification" of narrative in the West. Noting the radical narrative heterogeneity of magical realism, the author compares its cultural role to that of traditional shamanic performance, which joins the worlds of daily life and that of the spirits. Because of that capacity to bridge different worlds, magical realism has served as an effective decolonizing agent, providing the ground for marginal voices, submerged traditions, and emergent literatures to develop and create masterpieces. At the same time, this process is not limited to postcolonial situations but constitutes a global trend that replenishes realism from within.


The Paranoiac-critical method is a surrealist technique developed by Salvador Dalí in the early 1930s and often employed in the production of paintings and other artworks.

Origins

The Surrealists related theories of psychology to the idea of creativity and the production of art. In the mid-1930s Andre Breton wrote about a ‘fundamental crisis of the object’. The object began being thought of not as a fixed external object but also as an extension of our subjective self. One of the types of objects manifested in Surrealism was the phantom object.

According to Dali, these objects have a minimum of mechanical meaning, but when viewed the mind evokes phantom images which are the result of unconscious acts.

The paranoiac-critical arose from similar Surrealistic experiments with psychology and the creation of images such as Max Ernst’s frottage technique, which involved rubbing pencil or chalk over on paper over a textured surface and interpreting the phantom images visible in the texture on the paper.

Description

The aspect of paranoia that Dalí was interested in and which helped inspire the method was the ability of the brain to perceive links between things which rationally are not linked. Dalí described the paranoiac-critical method as a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena."

When employing the method when creating a work of art, an active process of the mind is used to visualise images in the work and incorporate these into the final product. An example of the resulting work is a double image or multiple image in which an ambiguous image can be interpreted in different ways.

André Breton hailed the method, saying that Dalí's paranoiac-critical method was an "instrument of primary importance" and that it "has immediately shown itself capable of being applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, the construction of typical Surrealist objects, fashion, sculpture, the history of art, and even, if necessary, all manner of exegesis."

Paranoiac-critical method

From Wikipedia

The Paranoiac-critical method is a surrealist technique developed by Salvador Dalí in the early 1930s and often employed in the production of paintings and other artworks.

Origins

The Surrealists related theories of psychology to the idea of creativity and the production of art. In the mid-1930s Andre Breton wrote about a ‘fundamental crisis of the object’. The object began being thought of not as a fixed external object but also as an extension of our subjective self. One of the types of objects manifested in Surrealism was the phantom object.

According to Dali, these objects have a minimum of mechanical meaning, but when viewed the mind evokes phantom images which are the result of unconscious acts.

The paranoiac-critical arose from similar Surrealistic experiments with psychology and the creation of images such as Max Ernst’s frottage technique, which involved rubbing pencil or chalk over on paper over a textured surface and interpreting the phantom images visible in the texture on the paper.

Description

The aspect of paranoia that Dalí was interested in and which helped inspire the method was the ability of the brain to perceive links between things which rationally are not linked. Dalí described the paranoiac-critical method as a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena."

When employing the method when creating a work of art, an active process of the mind is used to visualise images in the work and incorporate these into the final product. An example of the resulting work is a double image or multiple image in which an ambiguous image can be interpreted in different ways.

André Breton hailed the method, saying that Dalí's paranoiac-critical method was an "instrument of primary importance" and that it "has immediately shown itself capable of being applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, the construction of typical Surrealist objects, fashion, sculpture, the history of art, and even, if necessary, all manner of exegesis."

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoiac-critical_method"

Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, religion, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism.

In architecture, art, music and literature, postmodernism is a name for many stylistic reactions to, and developments from, modernism. Postmodern style is often characterized by eclecticism, digression, collage, pastiche, and irony. Some artistic movements commonly called postmodern are pop art, architectural deconstructivism, magical realism in literature, maximalism, and neo-romanticism. Postmodern theorists see postmodern art as a conflation or reversal of well-established modernist systems, such as the roles of artist versus audience, seriousness versus play, or high culture versus kitsch.

In sociology, postmodernism is described as the result of economic, cultural, and demographic changes. These changes include the rise of the service economy, the importance of the mass media, and the rise of an increasingly interdependent world economy. Related terms in this context include post-industrial society, late capitalism, information age, globalization, and global village. (See also Postmodern and Media theory).

As a cultural movement, postmodernism is an aspect of postmodernity, which is broadly defined as the condition of Western society after modernity. The adjective postmodern can refer to aspects of either postmodernism or postmodernity. According to postmodern theorist Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernity is characterized as an "incredulity toward metanarratives", meaning that in the era of postmodern culture, people have rejected the grand, supposedly universal stories and paradigms such as religion, conventional philosophy, capitalism and gender that have defined culture and behavior in the past, and have instead begun to organize their cultural life around a variety of more local and subcultural ideologies, myths and stories. Furthermore, it promotes the idea that all such metanarratives and paradigms are stable only while they fit the available evidence, and can potentially be overturned when phenomena occur that the paradigm cannot account for, and a better explanatory model (itself subject to the same fate) is found. See La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) in 1979, and the results of acceptance of postmodernism is the view that different realms of discourse are incomensurable and incapable of judging the results of other discourse, a conclusion he drew in La Differend (1983).

In philosophy, where the term is extensively used, it applies to movements that include post-structuralism, deconstruction, multiculturalism, gender studies and literary theory, sometimes called simply "theory". It emerged beginning in the 1950s as a critique of doctrines such as positivism and emphasizes the importance of power relationships, personalization and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. In this context it has been used by many critical theorists to assert that postmodernism is a break with the artistic and philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment, which they characterize as a quest for an ever-grander and more universal system of aesthetics, ethics, and knowledge. They present postmodernism as a radical criticism of Western philosophy. Postmodern philosophy draws on a number of approaches to criticize Western thought, including historicism, and psychoanalytic theory.

The term postmodernism is also used in a broader pejorative sense to describe attitudes, sometimes part of the general culture, and sometimes specifically aimed at postmodern critical theory, perceived as relativist, nihilist, counter-Enlightenment or antimodern, particularly in relationship to critiques of rationalism, universalism, or science. It is also sometimes used to describe social changes which are held to be antithetical to traditional systems of morality, particularly by evangelical Christians.

The role, proper usage, and meaning of postmodernism are matters of intense debate and vary widely with context.

The development of postmodernism

Features of postmodern culture begin to arise in the 1920s with the emergence of the dada movement, which featured collage and a focus on the framing of objects and discourse as being as important, or more important, than the work itself. Another strand which would have tremendous impact on post-modernism would be the existentialists, who placed the centrality of the individual narrative as being the source of morals and understanding. Einstein's theories and the rise of quantum physics began undermining the view of science as objective truth and lent scientific support to postmodern notions of subjective truth. However, it is with the end of the Second World War that recognizably post-modernist attitudes begin to emerge.

Central to these is the focusing on the problems of any knowledge which is founded on anything external to an individual. Post-modernism, while widely diverse in its forms, almost invariably begins from the problem of knowledge which is broadly disseminated in its form, but not limited in its interpretation. Post-modernism rapidly developed a vocabulary of anti-enlightenment rhetoric, used to argue that rationality was neither as sure or as clear as rationalists supposed, and that knowledge was inherently linked to time, place, social position and other factors from which an individual constructs their view of knowledge. To escape from constructed knowledge, it then becomes necessary to critique it, and thus deconstruct the asserted knowledge. Jacques Derrida argued that to defend against the inevitable self-deconstruction of knowledge, systems of power, called hegemony would have to postulate an original utterance, the logos. This "privileging" of an original utterance is called "logocentrism". Instead of rooting knowledge in particular utterances, or "texts", the basis of knowledge was seen to be in the free play of discourse itself, an idea rooted in Wittgenstein's idea of a language game. This emphasis on the allowability of free play within the context of conversation and discourse leads postmodernism to adopt the stance of irony, paradox, textual manipulation, reference and tropes.

Armed with this process of questioning the social basis of assertions, postmodernist philosophers began to attack unities of modernism, and particularly unities seen as being rooted in the Enlightenment. Since Modernism had made the Enlightenment a central source of its superiority over the Victorian and Romantic periods, this attack amounted to an indirect attack on the establishment of modernism itself. Perhaps the most striking examples of this skepticism are to be found in the works of French cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard. In his book Simulacra and Simulation, he contends that social 'reality' no longer exists in the conventional sense, but has been supplanted by an endless procession of simulacra. The mass media, and other forms of mass cultural production, generate constant re-appropriation and re-contextualisation of familiar cultural symbols and images, fundamentally shifting our experience away from 'reality', to 'hyperreality'. Along this line, it is significant that the beginning of postmodern architecture is not considered to be the construction of any great building, but the destruction of the modernist Pruitt-Igoe housing project (see Minoru Yamasaki).

Postmodernism therefore has an obvious distrust toward claims about truth, ethics, or beauty being rooted in anything other than individual perception and group construction. Utopian ideals of universally applicable truths or aesthetics give way to provisional, decentered, local petit recits which, rather than referencing an underlying universal truth or aesthetic, point only to other ideas and cultural artifacts, themselves subject to interpretation and re-interpretation. The "truth", since it can only be understood by all of its connections is perpetually "deferred", never reaching a point of fixed knowledge which can be called "the truth." This emphasis on construction and consensus is often used to attack science, as the Sokal Affair shows.

Postmodernism is often used in a larger sense, meaning the entire trend of thought in the late 20th century, and the social and philosophical realities of that period. Marxist critics argue that post-modernism is symptomatic of "late capitalism" and the decline of institutions, particularly the nation-state. Other thinkers assert that post-modernity is the natural reaction to mass broadcasting and a society conditioned to mass production and mass political decision making. The ability of knowledge to be endlessly copied defeats attempts to constrain interpretation, or to set "originality" by simple means such as the production of a work. From this perspective, the schools of thought labelled "postmodern" are not as widely at odds with their time period as the polemics and arguments appear, pointing, for example, to the shift of the basis of scientific knowledge to a provisional consensus of scientists, as posited by Thomas Kuhn. Post-modernism is seen, in this view, as being conscious of the nature of the discontinuity between modern and post-modern periods which is generally present.

Postmodernism has manifestations in many modern academic and non-academic disciplines: philosophy, theology, art, architecture, film, television, music, theatre, sociology, fashion, technology, literature, and communications are all heavily influenced by postmodern trends and ideas, and are thoroughly scrutinised from postmodern perspectives. Crucial to these are the denial of customary expectations, the use of non-orthogonal angles in buildings such as the work of Frank Gehry, and the shift in arts exemplified by the rise of minimalism in art and music. Post-modern philosophy often labels itself as critical theory and grounds the construction of identity in the mass media.

(Note: "post-modern" tends to be used by critics, "postmodern" by supporters. This may be because postmodern is considered merely a symbol and its meaning (as obtained through simple linguistic analysis) can be ignored.)

Postmodernism was first identified as a theoretical discipline in the 1980s, but as a cultural movement it predates them by many years. Exactly when modernism began to give way to postmodernism is difficult to pinpoint, if not simply impossible. Some theorists reject that such a distinction even exists, viewing postmodernism, for all its claims of fragmentation and plurality, as still existing within a larger 'modernist' framework. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas is a strong proponent of this view, which has aspects of a lumpers/splitters problem: is the entire 20th century one period, or two distinct periods?

The theory gained some of its strongest ground early on in French academia. In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard wrote a short but influential work The Postmodern Condition : a report on knowledge. Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes (in his more post-structural work) are also strongly influential in postmodern theory. Postmodernism is closely allied with several contemporary academic disciplines, most notably those connected with sociology. Many of its assumptions are integral to feminist and post-colonial theory.

Some identify the burgeoning anti-establishment movements of the 1960s as the earliest trend out of cultural modernity toward postmodernism.

Tracing it further back, some identify its roots in the breakdown of Hegelian idealism, and the impact of both World Wars (perhaps even the concept of a World War). Heidegger and Derrida were influential in re-examining the fundamentals of knowledge, together with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his philosophy of action, Soren Kierkegaard's and Karl Barth's important fideist approach to theology, and even the nihilism of Nietzsche's philosophy. Michel Foucault's application of Hegel to thinking about the body is also identified as an important landmark. While it is rare to pin down the specific origins of any large cultural shift, it is fair to assume that postmodernism represents an accumulated disillusionment with the promises of the Enlightenment project and its progress of science, so central to modern thinking.

The movement has had diverse political ramifications: its anti-ideological insights appear conducive to, and strongly associated with, the feminist movement, racial equality movements, gay rights movements, most forms of late 20th century anarchism, even the peace movement and various hybrids of these in the current anti-globalization movement. Unsurprisingly, none of these institutions entirely embraces all aspects of the postmodern movement, but reflect or, in true postmodern style, borrow from some of its core ideas.

Early usage of the term

In an essay From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context, [1] (http://www.ihabhassan.com/postmodernism_to_postmodernity.htm) Ihab Hassan points out a number of instances in which the term postmodernism was used before the term became popular:

Been able to successfully escape from this large web of text and reach the purely text-free "signified" which they imagined to exist "just beyond" the text?

Postmodernism in philosophy

Many figures in the 20th century philosophy of mathematics are identified as "postmodern" due to their rejection of mathematics as a strictly neutral point of view. Some figures in the philosophy of science, especially Thomas Samuel Kuhn and David Bohm, are also so viewed. Some see the ultimate expression of postmodernism in science and mathematics in the cognitive science of mathematics, which seeks to characterize the habit of mathematics itself as strictly human, and based in human cognitive bias.

The term "Neo-liberalism" has been used in a theological sense (http://www.adrian.warnock.info/2004/12/why-neo-liberal.htm,) as a drive to deliberately modify the beliefs and practices of the church (especially evangelical) to conform to post-modernism

Postmodernism and post-structuralism

In terms of frequently cited works, postmodernism and post-structuralism overlap quite significantly. Some philosophers, such as Francois Lyotard, can legitimately be classified into both groups. This is partly due to the fact that both modernism and structuralism owe much to the Enlightenment project.

Structuralism has a strong tendency to be scientific in seeking out stable patterns in observed phenomena - an epistemological attitude which is quite compatible with Enlightenment thinking, and incompatible with postmodernists. At the same time, findings from structuralist analysis carried a somewhat anti-Enlightenment message, revealing that rationality can be found in the minds of 'savage' people, just in forms differing from those that people from 'civilized' societies are used to seeing. Implicit here is a critique of the practice of colonialism, which was partly justified as a 'civilizing' process by which wealthier societies bring knowledge, manners, and reason to less 'civilized' ones.

Post-structuralism, emerging as a response to the structuralists' scientific orientation, has kept the cultural relativism in structuralism, while discarding the scientific orientations.

One clear difference between postmodernism and poststructuralism is found in their respective attitudes towards the demise of the project of the Enlightenment: post-structuralism is fundamentally ambivalent, while postmodernism is decidedly celebratory.

Another difference is the nature of the two positions. While post-structuralism is a position in philosophy, encompassing views on human beings, language, body, society, and many other issues, it is not a name of an era. Post-modernism, on the other hand, is closely associated with "post-modern" era, a period in the history coming after the modern age.


Rococo and Neoclassicism

The death of Louis XIV lead to a period of licentious freedom commonly called the Régence. The heir to Louis XIV, his great grandson Louis XV of France, was only 5 years old; for the next seven years France was ruled by the regent Philippe II of Orléans. Versailles was abandoned from 1715 to 1722. Painting turned toward "fêtes galantes", theater settings and the female nude. Painters from this period include Antoine Watteau, Nicolas Lancret and François Boucher.

One of Diderot's favorite painters was Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Although often considered kitsch by today's standards, his paintings of domestic scenes reveal the importance of Sentimentalism in the European arts of the period (as also seen in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Samuel Richardson.)

One also finds in this period a kind of "Pre-romanticism". Hubert Robert's images of ruins, inspired by Italian cappricio paintings, are typical in this respect. So too the change from the rational and geometrical "French garden" (of André Le Nôtre) to the "English garden", which emphasized (artificially) wild and irrational nature. One also finds in some of these gardens curious ruins of temples called "follies".

The middle of the 18th century saw a turn to Neoclassicism in France, that is to say a conscious use of Greek and Roman forms and iconography. In painting, the greatest representative of this style is Jacques Louis David who, mirroring the profiles of Greek vases, emphasized the use of the profile; his subject matter often involved classical history (the death of Socrates, Brutus). The dignity and subject matter of his paintings were greatly inspired by Nicolas Poussin in the 17th century.

The "Louis XVI style" of furniture (once again already present in the previous reign) tended toward circles and ovals in chair backs; chair legs were grooved; Greek inspired iconography was used as decoration.

The French neoclassical style would greatly contribute to the monumentalism of the French revolution, as typified in the structures La Madeleine church (begun in 1763 and finished in1840) which is in the form of a Greek temple and the mammouth Panthéon (1764-1812) which today houses the tombs of great Frenchmen. The rationalism and simplicity of classical architecture was seen -- in the age of Enlightenment -- as the antithesis of the backward-looking Gothic.

The Greek and Roman subject matters were also often chosen to promote the values of republicanism. One also finds paintings glorifying the heroes and martyrs of the French revolution, such as David's painting of the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, a student of David's who was also influenced by Raphael and John Flaxman, would maintain the precision of David's style, while also exploring other mythological (Oedipus and the sphynx, Jupiter and Thetis) and oriental (the Odalesques) subjects in the spirit of Romanticism.


Romanticism

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars brought great changes to the arts in France. The program of exaltation and mythification of the Emperor Napoleon I of France was closely coordinated in the paintings of Gros and Guérin.

Meanwhile, Orientalism, Egyptian motifs, the tragic anti-hero, the wild landscape, the historical novel and scenes from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, all these elements of Romanticism created a vibrant period that defies easy classification.

One also finds in the early period of the 19th century a repeat of the debate carried on in the 17th between the supporters of Rubens and Poussin: there are defenders of the "line" as found in Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and the violent colors and curves as found in Eugène Delacroix. The comparison is however somewhat false, for Ingres' intense realism sometimes gives way to amazing voluptuousness in his Turkish bath scenes.

The Romantic tendencies continued throughout the century: both idealized landscape painting and Naturalism have their seeds in Romanticism: both Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon school are logical developments, as is too the late 19th century Symbolism of such painters at Gustave Moreau (the professor of Matisse and Rouault) or Odilon Redon.


Birth of the Modern

Walter Benjamin called Paris "the capital of the 19th century". In order to understand the amazing diversity of artistic expressions which Paris gave birth to from the 1860s to the 1940s, one needs to understand both the unique experience of this city and the financial, social and political experiments that it was host to.

Baron Haussmann's massive renovation of the city created amazing perspectives and broad boulevards, but also replaced poorer neighborhoods and created fast routes to move troops through the city to quell unrest. Yet there was also a second Paris at the limits of Haussmann's city on the hill of Montmartre with her windmills, cabarets and vineyards. Café culture, cabarets, arcades (19th century covered malls), anarchism, the mixing of classes, the radicalization of art and artistic movements caused by the academic salon system, a boisterous willingness to shock… all this made for a stunning vibrancy. What is more, the dynamic debate in the visual arts is also repeated in the same period in music, dance, architecture and the novel: Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Proust, Nijinski… This is the birth of Modernism.

Edouard Manet represents for many critics the division between the 19th century and the modern period (much like Charles Baudelaire in poetry). His rediscovery of Spanish painting from the golden age, his willingness to show the unpainted canvas, his exploration of the forthright nude and his radical brush strokes are the first step toward Impressionism.

Impressionism will take the Barbizon school one further, rejecting once and for all a belabored style (and the use of mixed colors and black), for fragile transitive effects of light as captured outdoors in changing light (in part inspired by the paintings of Turner). Claude Monet with his cathedrals and haystacks, Pierre-Auguste Renoir with both his early outdoor festivals and his later feathery style of ruddy nudes, Edgar Degas with his dancers and bathers.

Some of these techniques were made possible by new paints available in tubes. These painters were also to a certain degree in a dialogue with another discovery of the 19th century: photography.

From this point on, the next thirty years are a litany of amazing experiments. Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch born but living in France, opened the road to expressionism. Georges Seurat, influenced by color theory, devised a pointillist technique that controlled the Impressionist experiment. Paul Cézanne, a painter's painter, attempted a geometrical exploration of the world (that left many of his peers indifferent). Paul Gauguin, the banker, found symbolism in Brittany and then exoticism and primitivism in French Polynesia. Henri Rousseau, the self-taught dabbler, becomes the model for the naïve revolution.

The products of the far east brought new influences. Les Nabis explored a decorative art in flat plains with a Japanese print graphic approach. The discovery of African tribal masks lead Pablo Picasso to his "Demoiselles d'Avignon" of 1907. Picasso and Georges Braque (working independently) returned to and refined Cézanne's way of rationally understanding objects in a flat medium; but their experiments in cubism would also lead them to integrate all aspects of the day to day life: collage of newspapers, musical instruments, cigarettes, wine… Cubism in all its phases would dominate Europe and America for the next ten years.

At roughly the same time, Fauvism, exploded in color (much like German Expressionism).


Dada and Surrealism

World War I did not stop the dynamic creation. In 1916 a group of discontents met in a bar in Zurich (the Cabaret Voltaire) and create the most radical gesture possible: the anti-art of Dada. At the same time, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp in Paris were exploring similar notions. In an art show in New York in 1917 Duchamp present a white porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt" as work of art, becoming the father of the "readymade".

The killing fields of the war (nearly one-tenth of the French adult male population had been killed or wounded) had made many see the absurdity of existence. This was also the period when the "Lost Generation" took hold: rich Americans enjoying the liberties of Prohibition-free France in the 1920s and poor G.I.'s going abroad for the first time. Paris was also, for African-Americans, amazingly free of the racial restrictions found in America (James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Josephine Baker).

When Dada reached Paris, it was avidly embraced by a group of young artists and writers who were fascinated with the writings of Sigmund Freud, and particularly by the notion of the unconscious mind. The provocative spirit of dada became linked to the exploration of the unconscious mind through the use of automatic writing, chance operations and, in some cases, altered states. The surrealists quickly turned to painting and sculpture. The shock of unexpected elements, the use of frottage, collage and decalcomania, the rendering of mysterious landscapes and dreamscapes were to become the key techniques through the rest of the 1930s.

World War II ended the feast. Many surrealists (like Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, André Breton and André Masson fled occupied France for New York and the States (Duchamp had already been in the U.S. since 1936), but the cohesion and vibrancy were lost in the American geometric city.

Meanwhile a new generation of Americans were making art that finally owed nothing (or nearly so) to the old world.


Post War

The French art scene immediately after the war went roughly in two directions. There were those who continued in the artistic experiments, especially surrealism, from before the war, and there were those who took on the new Abstract Expressionism and action painting from New York and tried them in a French manner (Tachism or L'Art informel). Parallel to both of these tendencies, Jean Dubuffet dominated the early post-war years while exploring child-like drawings, graffiti and cartoons in a variety of media.

The late 1950s and early 1960s in France saw what might be considered "Pop Art" : Yves Klein had attractive nude women roll around in blue paint and throw themselves at canvases ; Victor Vasarely invented Op-Art by designing sophisticated optical patterns ; artists of the Fluxus movement like Ben Vautier incorporated graffiti and found objects into their work ; Niki de Saint-Phalle created bloated and vibrant plastic figures ; Arman gathered together found objects in boxed or resin-coated assemblages and César Baldaccini produced a series of large compressed object-scuptures (similar to Chamberlain's crushed automobiles).

In May 1968, the radical youth movement, through their attelier populaire, produced a great deal of poster-art protesting the moribund policies of president Charles de Gaulle.

Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modelling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory).

Criticisms of Chomsky's linguistics

Although Chomsky's is the best known position in linguistics his views have been criticised. Perhaps the best known alternative to Chomsky's position is that proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Their cognitive linguistics developed out of Chomskyan linguistics but differs from it in significant ways. Specifically, they argue against the neo-Cartesian aspects of Chomsky's theories, and state that Chomsky fails to take account of the extent to which cognition is embodied. As noted above, connectionist views of learning are not compatible with Chomsky's. Also, newer movements in psychology, such as, for example, situated cognition and discursive psychology are not compatible with Chomsky's views.

In a much more radical way, philosophers in the tradition of Wittgenstein (such as Saul Kripke) argue that Chomskyans are fundamentally wrong about the role of rule following in human cognition. In a similar way philosophers in the phenomenological/existential/hermeneutic traditions oppose the abstract neo-rationalist aspects of Chomsky's thought. The contemporary philosopher who best represents this view is, perhaps, Hubert Dreyfus, also famous (or notorious) for his attacks on artificial intelligence.

Contributions to psychology

Chomsky's work in linguistics has had major implications for psychology and its fundamental direction in the 20th century. His theory of a universal grammar was a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how language is learned by children and what, exactly, is the ability to interpret language. The more basic principles of this theory (though not necessarily the stronger claims made by the principles and parameters approach described above) are now generally accepted.

In 1959, Chomsky published a long-circulated critique of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, a book in which the leader of the behaviorist psychologists that had dominated psychology in the first half of the 20th century argued that language was merely a "behavior." Skinner argued that language, like any other behavior — from a dog's salivation in anticipation of dinner, to a master pianist's performance — could be attributed to "training by reward and penalty over time." Language, according to Skinner, was completely learned by cues and conditioning from the world around the language-learner.

Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for a revolution against the behaviorist doctrine that had governed psychology. In his 1966 Cartesian Linguistics and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in other areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.

There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. The former view had denied even this, arguing that there were only "stimulus-response" relationships like "If you ask me if I want X, I will say yes". By contrast, Chomsky showed that the common way of understanding the mind, as having things like beliefs and even unconscious mental states, had to be right. Second, he argued that large parts of what the adult mind can do are "innate". While no child is born automatically able to speak a language, all are born with a powerful language-learning ability which allows them to soak up several languages very quickly in their early years. Subsequent psychologists have extended this thesis far beyond language; the mind is no longer considered a "blank slate" at birth.

Finally, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions)

Criticism of science culture

Chomsky has written strong refutations of deconstructionist and postmodern criticisms of science:

"I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as 'science,' 'rationality,' 'logic,' and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me 'transcend' these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, 'my eyes glaze over' when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed."


Chomsky notes that critiques of "white male science" are much like the anti-Semitic and politically motivated attacks against "Jewish physics" used by the Nazis to denigrate research done by Jewish scientists during the Deutsche Physik movement:


"In fact, the entire idea of 'white male science' reminds me, I'm afraid, of 'Jewish physics.' Perhaps it is another inadequacy of mine, but when I read a scientific paper, I can't tell whether the author is white or is male. The same is true of discussion of work in class, the office, or somewhere else. I rather doubt that the non-white, non-male students, friends, and colleagues with whom I work would be much impressed with the doctrine that their thinking and understanding differ from 'white male science' because of their 'culture or gender and race.' I suspect that 'surprise' would not be quite the proper word for their reaction." [1] (http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/95-science.html)

Political views

Chomsky is one of the most well-known figures of left-wing American politics. He defines himself in the tradition of anarchism, a political philosophy he summarizes as challenging all forms of hierarchy and attempting to eliminate them if they are unjustified. He especially identifies with the labor-oriented anarcho-syndicalist current of anarchism. Unlike many anarchists, Chomsky does not always object to electoral politics; he has even endorsed candidates for office. He has described himself as a "fellow traveller" to the anarchist tradition as opposed to a pure anarchist to explain why he is sometimes willing to engage with the state.

Chomsky has also stated that he considers himself to be a conservative (Chomsky's Politics, pp. 188) presumably of the classical liberal variety. He has further defined himself as a Zionist; although, he notes that his definition of Zionism is considered by most to be anti-Zionism these days, the result of what he perceives to have been a shift (since the 1940s) in the meaning of Zionism (Chomsky Reader). In a C-Span Book TV interview, he stated:

"I have always supported a Jewish ethnic homeland in Palestine. That is different from a Jewish state. There's a strong case to be made for an ethnic homeland, but as to whether there should be a Jewish state, or a Muslim state, or a Christian state, or a white state — that's entirely another matter."

Overall, Chomsky is not fond of traditional political titles and categories and prefers to let his views speak for themselves. His main modes of actions include writing magazine articles and books and making speaking engagements. He has a large following of supporters worldwide, leading him to schedule speaking engagements sometimes up to two years in advance. He was one of the main speakers at the 2002 World Social Foru

Chomsky on terrorism

Chomsky differs from conventional views in that he sees state terrorism, as opposed to terrorism by fringe political movements, as the predominating form. He clearly distinguishes between the targeting of civilians and the targeting of military personnel or installations, ththereby demonstrating that in his view causes, reasons or goals do not justify acts of terrorism. For Chomsky, terrorism is objective, not relative. He states in his book 9-11:

"Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism." (pp. 76)

On the efficiency of terrorism:

"One is the fact that terrorism works. It doesn't fail. It works. Violence usually works. That's world history. Secondly, it's a very serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done, that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Like other means of violence, it's primarily a weapon of the strong, overwhelmingly, in fact. It is held to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn't count as terror. Now that's close to universal. I can't think of a historical exception, even the worst mass murderers view the world that way. So take the Nazis. They weren't carrying out terror in occupied Europe. They were protecting the local population from the terrorisms of the partisans. And like other resistance movements, there was terrorism. The Nazis were carrying out counter terror."

Criticism of the United States government

He has been a consistent and outspoken critic of the United States government. In his book 9-11, a series of interviews about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he claims, as he has done before, that the United States government is the leading terrorist state in modern times.

Chomsky has criticized the government for its involvement in the Vietnam War and the larger Indochina conflict, as well as its interference in Central and South American countries and its military support of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Chomsky focuses his most intense criticism on official friends of the United States government while criticizing official enemies like the former Soviet Union and North Vietnam only in passing. He explains this by the following principle: it is more important to evaluate actions which you have more possibility of affecting. His criticism of the former Soviet Union and China must have had some effect in those countries; both countries banned his work from publication.

Chomsky has repeatedly emphasized his theory that much of the United States' foreign policy is based on the "threat of a good example" (which he says is another name for the domino theory). The "threat of a good example" is that a country could successfully develop independently from capitalism and the United States' influences, thus presenting a model for other countries, including countries in which the United States has strong economic interests. This, Chomsky says, has prompted the United States to repeatedly intervene to quell "socialist" or other "independence" movements in regions of the world where it has no significant economic or safety interests. In one of his most famous works, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chomsky uses this particular theory as an explanation for the United States' interventions in Guatemala, Laos, Nicaragua, and Grenada.

Chomsky believes the US government's Cold War policies were not entirely shaped by anti-Soviet paranoia, but rather toward preserving the United States' ideological and economic dominance in the world. As he wrote in Uncle Sam: "...What the US wants is 'stability,' meaning security for the "upper classes and large foreign enterprises."

Views on socialism

Chomsky is deeply opposed to what he calls "corporate state capitalism" practiced by the United States and its allies. He supports Mikhail Bakunin's anarchist (or "libertarian socialist") ideas, requiring economic freedom in addition to the "control of production by the workers themselves, not owners and managers who rule them and control all decisions." He refers to this as "real socialism," and describes Soviet-style socialism as similar in terms of "totalitarian controls" to U.S.-style capitalism, saying that each is a system based in types and levels of control, rather than in organization or efficiency. In defense of this thesis, Chomsky sometimes points out that Frederick Winslow Taylor's philosophy of scientific management was the organizational basis for the Soviet Union's massive industrialization movement as well as the American corporate model.

Chomsky has illuminated Bakunin's comments on the totalitarian state as predictions for the brutal Soviet police state that would come. He echoes Bakunin's statement "...after a year" [..] "the revolutionary will become worse than the czar himself," which expands upon the idea that the tyrannical Soviet state was simply a natural growth from the Bolshevik ideology of state control. He has also termed Soviet communism as "fake socialism," and said that contrary to what many in America claim, the collapse of the Soviet Union should be regarded "a small victory for socialism," not capitalism.

In For Reasons of State Chomsky advocates that instead of a capitalist system in which people are "wage slaves" or an authoritarian system in which decisions are made by a centralized committee, a society could function with no paid labor. He argues that a nation's populace should be free to pursue jobs of their choosing. People will be free to do as they like, and the work they voluntarily choose will be both "rewarding in itself" and "socially useful." Society would be run under a system of peaceful anarchism, with no state or government institutions.

Public sphere

A concept in continental philosophy and critical theory, the public sphere contrasts with the private sphere, and is the part of life in which one is interacting with others and with society at large. Much of the thought about the public sphere relates to the concept of identity and identity politics.

Heidegger claims that Dasein must balance its activities in the public sphere with its private, authentic activities, but believed ultimately that engagement in the public sphere was necessary to truly be Dasein. Hannah Arendt inverted Heidegger's claim, arguing that in fact the only true and authentic self was the self in the public sphere.

Franz Fanon discusses the way in which one's identity in the public sphere and one's identity in the private sphere can become dissonant, leading to what he calls dual consciousness. His examples deal with issues of colonialism, and the way in which a colonized subject is forced to publicly adopt a foreign culture, while privately they maintain their identity as their own culture.

In contemporary thought, informed by the rise of postmodernism, questions about the public sphere have turned to questions about the ways in which hegemonic forces dictate what discourse is and is not allowable in the public sphere, and in turn dictate what can and can't be formulated as a part of one's identity. For example, the concept of heteronormativity is used to describe the way in which those who fall outside of the basic male/female dichotomy of gender or whose sexual preferences are other than heterosexual cannot meaningfully claim their identities, causing a disconnect between their public selves and their private selves. Lauren Berlant has gone so far as to argue that there is in fact no public discourse about sex or sexuality whatsoever, leaving all sexual identity in the realm of the private sphere, where it is, in her view, deadened and powerless.

Important contemporary thinkers about the public sphere include Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Eve Sedgwick.

See also public place

Cultural movement

A cultural movement is a change in the way a number of different disciplines approach their work. This embodies all art forms, the sciences, and philosophies. Long ago, different nations or regions of the world would go through their own independent sequence of movements in culture, but as world communications have accelerated this geographical distinction has become less noteworthy. When cultural movements go through revolutions from one to the next, genres tend to get attacked and mixed up, and often new genres are generated and old ones fade. These changes are often reactions against the prior cultural form, which typically has grown stale and repetitive. An obsession emerges among the mainstream with the new movement, and the old one falls into neglect - sometimes it dies out entirely, but often it chugs along favored in a few disciplines and occasionally making reappearances (sometimes prefixed with "neo-").

There is continual argument over the precise definition of each of these periods, and one historian might group them differently, or choose different names or descriptions. As well, even though in many cases the popular change from one to the next can be swift and sudden, the beginning and end of movements are somewhat subjective, as the movements did not spring fresh into existence out of the blue and did not come to an abrupt end and lose total support, as would be suggested by a date range. Thus use of the term "period" is somewhat deceptive. "Period" also suggests a linearity of development, whereas it has not been uncommon for two or more distinctive cultural approaches to be active at the same time. Historians will be able to find distinctive traces of a cultural movement before its accepted beginning, and there will always be new creations in old forms. So it can be more useful to think in terms of broad "movements" that have rough beginnings and endings. Yet for historical perspective, some rough date ranges will be provided for each to indicate the "height" or accepted timespan of the movement.

Humanism - 1500s

Renaissance - use of light, shadow, and perspective to more accurately represent life. Because of how fundamentally these ideas were felt to alter so much of life, some have referred to it as the "Golden Age". In reality it was less an "Age" and more of a movement in popular philosophy, science, and thought that spread over Europe (and probably other parts of the world), over time, and affected different aspects of culture at different points in time. Very roughly, the following periods can be taken as indicative of place/time foci of the Renaissance: Italian Renaissance 1450-1550. Spanish Renaissance 1550-1587. English Renaissance 1588-1629.

Mannerism - anti-classicist movement that sought to emphasize the feeling of the artist himself.

Baroque - emphasizes power and authority, characterized by intricate detail and without the "disturbing angst" of Mannerism. Essentially is exaggerated Classicism to promote and glorify the Church and State. Occupied with notions of infinity.

Rococo

Neoclassical - 17th-19th centuries - severe, unemotional movement recalling Roman and Greek ("classical") style, reacting against the overbred Rococo style and the emotional Baroque style. It stimulated revival of classical thinking, and had especially profound effects on science and politics. Also had a direct influence on Academic Art in the 1800s. Beginning in the early 1600s with Cartesian thought (see René Descartes), this movement provided philosophical frameworks for the natural sciences, sought to determine the principles of knowledge by rejecting all things previously believed to be known about the world. In Renaissance Classicism attempts are made to recreate the classic artforms - tragedy, comedy, and farce.

Cartesian -- French neoclassicism 1630-1680.

Romanticism - 1770-1830 - Began in Germany and spread to England and France as a reaction to Neoclassicism. The notion of "folk genius", or an inborn and intuitive ability to do magnificent things, is a core principle of the Romantic movement. Nostalgia for the primitive past in preference to the scientifically minded present. Romantic heroes, exemplified by Napoleon, are popular. Fascination with the past leads to a resurrection of interest in the Gothic period. It did not really replace the Neoclassical movement so much as provide a counterbalance; many artists sought to join both styles in their works.

Symbolism

Realism - 1830-1905 - Ushered in by the Industrial Revolution and growing Nationalism in the world. Began in France. Attempts to portray the speech and mannerisms of everyday people in everyday life. Tends to focus on middle class social and domestic problems. Plays by Isben are an example. Naturalism is a more extreme version of Realism that followed it briefly. Impressionism, based on 'scientific' knowledge and discoveries concerns observing nature and reality objectively.

Fauvism -- Post-impressionism -- Pre-Raphaelite

Art Nouveau - 1880-1905 decorative, symbolic art

Transcendentalism

Modernism - 1880-1965 - Also known as the Avant-garde movement. Originating in the 19th century with Symbolism, the Modernist movement composed itself of a wide range of 'isms' that ran in constrast to Realism and that sought out the underlying fundamentals of art and philosophy. The Jazz age and Hollywood emerge and have their hey-days.

Cubism -- Futurism -- Suprematism -- Dadaism -- Constructivism -- Surrealism -- Expressionism -- Existentialism -- Op Art -- Art Deco -- Bauhaus -- Neo-Plasticism -- Precisionism -- Abstract expressionism -- Pop Art -- Photorealism -- Minimalism -- Situationism

Postmodernism - 1965-? - A reaction to Modernism, in a way, Postmodernism largely discards the notion that artists should seek pure fundamentals, often questioning whether such fundamentals even exist - or suggestion that if they do exist, they may be irrelevant. Exemplified by movements such as deconstruction, conceptual art, etc.


Rationalism, also known as the rationalist movement, is a philosophical doctrine that asserts that the truth should be determined by reason and factual analysis, rather than faith, dogma or religious teaching. Rationalism has some similarities in ideology and intent to secular humanism and atheism, in that it aims to provide a framework for social and philosophical discourse outside of religious or supernatural beliefs; however, rationalism differs from both of these, in that:

Outside of religious discussion, the discipline of rationalism may be applied more generally, for example to political or social issues. In these cases it is the rejection of emotion, tradition or fashionable belief which is the defining feature of the rationalist perspective.

During the middle of the twentieth century there was a strong tradition of organised rationalism, which was particularly influenced by free thinkers and intellectuals.

Modern rationalism has little in common with the historical philosophy of continental rationalism expounded by René Descartes. Indeed, a reliance on empirical science is often considered a hallmark of modern rationalism, whereas Continental Rationalism rejected empiricism entirely.


Ordinary Enchantments
Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative

Wendy B. Faris

Ordinary Enchantments investigates magical realism as the most important trend in contemporary international fiction, defines its characteristics and narrative techniques, and proposes a new theory to explain its significance. In the most comprehensive critical treatment of this literary mode to date, Wendy B. Faris discusses a rich array of examples from magical realist novels around the world, including the work not only of Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but also of authors like Salman Rushdie, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, and Ben Okri.

Faris argues that by combining realistic representation with fantastic elements so that the marvelous seems to grow organically out of the ordinary, magical realism destabilizes the dominant form of realism based on empirical definitions of reality, gives it visionary power, and thus constitutes what might be called a "remystification" of narrative in the West. Noting the radical narrative heterogeneity of magical realism, the author compares its cultural role to that of traditional shamanic performance, which joins the worlds of daily life and that of the spirits. Because of that capacity to bridge different worlds, magical realism has served as an effective decolonizing agent, providing the ground for marginal voices, submerged traditions, and emergent literatures to develop and create masterpieces. At the same time, this process is not limited to postcolonial situations but constitutes a global trend that replenishes realism from within.

In addition to describing what many consider to be the progressive cultural work of magical realism, Faris also confronts the recent accusation that magical realism and its study as a global phenomenon can be seen as a form of commodification and an imposition of cultural homogeneity. And finally, drawing on the narrative innovations and cultural scenarios that magical realism enacts, she extends those principles toward issues of gender and the possibility of a female element within magical realism.

Wendy B. Faris is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is the author of Carlos Fuentes and Labyrinths of Language: Symbolic Landscape and Narrative Design in Modern Fiction, as well as co-editor of Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community.


Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 - March 25, 1980) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher and semiotician. His long productive career reached from the early days of structuralist linguistics in France up to the peak of post-structuralism, and Barthes's works are considered key texts of both structuralism and post-structuralism. (Because Barthes was openly gay, some take him as an antecedent for queer theory as well.) In addition, the autobiographical and aesthetic qualities of many of Barthes's texts makes them literature in their own right.

In his 1968 essay "The Death of the Author," Barthes made a strong, polemical argument against the centrality of the figure of the author in literary study. (Michel Foucault's later article "What is an Author?" responded to Barthes's polemic with an analysis of the social and literary "author-function.")

In his 1971 essay "From Work to Text", Barthes takes this idea further, arguing that while a 'work' (such as a book or a film) contains meanings that are unproblematically traceable back to the author (and therefore closed), a text (the same book or film - or whatever) is actually something that remains open. The resulting concept of intertextuality implies that meaning is brought to a cultural object by its audience and does not intrinsically reside in the object.

Barthes's book S/Z is often called the masterpiece of structuralist literary criticism. In S/Z, Barthes dissects the story "Sarrasine" by Honoré de Balzac at length, proceeding sentence by sentence, assigning each word and sentence to one or several "codes" and levels of meaning within the story.

Barthes's cultural criticism, published in volumes including Mythologies, is one of the key antecedents for later cultural studies, the application of techniques of literary and social criticism to mass culture. Mythologies is a collection of extremely brief, clever analyses of cultural objects from zoos to museums to fashion (a topic Barthes later took up in detail with The Fashion System).

Some of Barthes's later work, while it remains critical, is also personal and emotional. Most famously, his book Roland Barthes (often known as Barthes by Barthes) is a theoretical autobiography, organized in alphabetical sections rather than chronological ones. His last book, Camera Lucida, is a personal memoir, an epitaph for his mother (and himself), and a study of photography. (Jacques Derrida wrote, in his essay "The Deaths of Roland Barthes," about Camera Lucida that its "time and tempo accompanied his death as no other book, I believe, has ever kept vigil over its author.")


Existentialism

Existentialism is a philosophical movement characterized by an emphasis on individualism, individual freedom, and subjectivity. Existentialism emphasises the idea that existence precedes essence, i.e., that one must be alive in order to create meaning, and that each person is therefore gifted with individual moments to make choices. Camus emphasizes this idea in The Stranger when Meursault exclaims "we are all privileged". It was inspired by the works of Søren Kierkegaard and the German philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and was particularly popular around the mid-20th century with the works of the French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, and others, including the novelist, essayist, and playwright Albert Camus. The main tenets of the movement are set out in Sartre's L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, translated as Existentialism is a Humanism.

Though many, if not most, existentialists were atheists, Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel pursued more theological versions of existentialism. The one-time Marxist Nikolai Berdyaev developed a philosophy of Christian existentialism in his native Russia and later France during the decades preceding World War II.

Postmodernism (or LaMo, Late Modernism?



Symbolisn was a late nineteenth century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts.


Precursors and origins

French Symbolism was in large part a reaction against Naturalism and Realism, movements which attempted to capture reality in its particularity. Symbolist movement poetry has been said by some to begin with the influential series of poems Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire, although work by poets such as Gérard de Nerval and Arthur Rimbaud were also highly significant in this respect. Symbolism represents an outgrowth of the more gothic and darker sides of Romanticism; but where Romanticism was impetuous and rebellious, Symbolism was static and hieratic. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images.


Symbolism as a movement

Symbolists believed that art should aim to capture more absolute truths which could only be accessed by indirect methods. Thus, they wrote in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. The Symbolist manifesto was published in 1886 by Jean Moréas. Moréas announced that Symbolism was hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description," and that its goal instead was to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form" whose: "goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal:"

In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.

But perhaps of the several attempts at defining the essence of Symbolism, none was more influential than Paul Verlaine's 1884 publication of a series of essays on Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarmé, each of whom Verlaine numbered among the poètes maudits, "accursed poets."

Verlaine argued that in their individual and very different ways, each of these hitherto neglected poets found genius a curse; it isolated them from their contemporaries, and as a result these poets were not at all concerned to avoid hermeticism and idiosyncratic writing styles. In this conception of genius and the role of the poet, Verlaine referred obliquely to the aesthetics of Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, who held that the purpose of art was to provide a temporary refuge from the world of blind strife of the will.

Schopenhauer's aesthetics reflected shared concerns with the Symbolist programme; they both tended to look to Art as a contemplative refuge from the world of strife and Will. From this desire for an artistic refuge from the world, the Symbolists took characteristic themes of mysticism and otherworldliness, a keen sense of mortality, and a sense of the malign power of sexuality. Mallarmé's poem Les fenêtres expresses all of these themes clearly. A dying man in a hospital bed, seeking escape from the pain and dreariness of his physical surroundings, turns toward his window; turns away in disgust from:

. . . . l'homme a l'âme dure
Vautré dans le bonheur, où ses seuls appétits
Mangent, et qui s'entête à chercher cette ordure
Pour l'offrir à la femme allaitant ses petits,
("the hard-souled man, wallowing in happiness, where only his appetites feed, and who insists on seeking out this filth to offer to his female suckling his children")

and in contrast, he exclaims:

Je me mire et me vois ange! Et je meurs, et j'aime
-Que la vitre soit l'art, soit la mysticité -
A renaître, portant mon rêve en diadème,
Au ciel antérieur où fleurit la Beauté!
("I marvel at myself, I seem an angel! and I die, and I love --- whether the glass might be art, or mysticism --- to be reborn, bearing my dream as a diadem, under that former sky where Beauty once flourished.")

The Symbolist movement has frequently been confused with Decadence. Several young writers were derisively referred to in the press as "decadent" in the mid 1880s. Jean Moréas' manifesto was largely a response to this polemic. A few of these writers embraced the term while most avoided it. Although the esthetics of Symbolism and Decadence can be seen as overlapping in some areas, the two remain distinct.


In other media

Symbolism in literature is distinct from Symbolism in art although the two overlapped on a number of points. There were several, rather dissimilar, groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists, among whom Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Fantin-Latour, Edvard Munch, Félicien Rops, and Jan Toorop were numbered. Symbolism in painting had an even larger geographical reach than Symbolism in poetry, reaching several Russian artists, as well as figures such as Elihu Vedder in the United States. Auguste Rodin is sometimes considered a Symbolist in sculpture.

Symbolism had some influence in music as well. Many Symbolist writers and critics were early enthusiasts for the music of Richard Wagner, a fellow student of Schopenhauer. The Symbolist aesthetic had a deep impact on the works of Claude Debussy. His choice of libretti, texts, and themes come almost exclusively from the Symbolist canon: in particular, compositions such as his settings of Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire, various art songs on poems by Verlaine, the opera Pelléas et Mélisande with a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck, and his unfinished sketches that illustrate two Poe stories, The Devil in the Belfry and The Fall of the House of Usher, all indicate that Debussy was profoundly influenced by Symbolist themes and tastes. His best known work, the Prélude à 'L'après-midi d'un faune, was inspired by a poem by Mallarmé, L'après-midi d'un faune. Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire takes its text from German translations of the Symbolist poems by Albert Giraud, showing a link between German expressionism and Symbolism.

Symbolism's cult of the static and hieratic adapted less well to narrative fiction than it did to poetry. Joris-Karl Huysmans' 1884 novel À rebours (English title: Against the Grain) contained many themes which became associated with the Symbolist esthetic. This novel in which very little happens is a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive antihero. The novel was imitated by Oscar Wilde in several passages of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Paul Adam was the most prolific and most representative author of Symbolist novels. Les Demoiselles Goubert co-written with Jean Moréas in 1886 is an important transitional work between Naturalism and Symbolism. Few Symbolists used this form. One exception is Gustave Kahn who published Le Roi fou in 1896. Other fiction that is sometimes considered Symbolist is the cynical misanthropic (and especially, misogynistic) tales of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. Gabriele d'Annunzio wrote his first novels in the Symbolist vein.


Aftermath

In the English speaking world, the closest counterpart to Symbolism was Aestheticism; the Pre-Raphaelites, also, were contemporaries of the earlier Symbolists, and have much in common with them. Symbolism had a significant influence on Modernism and its traces can be seen in a number of modernist artists, including T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, and William Butler Yeats in the anglophone tradition and Rubén Darío in Hispanic letters. The early poems of Guillaume Apollinaire have strong affinities with Symbolism.

As the movement was losing its forward movement in France, after the turn of the twentieth century it became a major force in Russian poetry. The Russian Symbolist movement was the starting point of the careers of major figures such as Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, and Marina Tsvetaeva.

The Symbolist painters were an important influence on expressionism and surrealism in painting, two movements which descend directly from Symbolism proper. The harlequins, paupers, and clowns of Pablo Picasso's "blue period" show the influence of Symbolism, and especially of Puvis de Chavannes. In Belgium, where Symbolism had penetrated deeply, so much so that it came to be thought of as a national style, the static strangeness of painters like René Magritte can be seen as a direct continuation of Symbolism. The work of some Symbolist visual artists directly impacted the curvilinear forms of art nouveau.

Many early motion pictures, also, contain a good deal of Symbolist visual imagery and themes in their staging, set designs, and imagery. The films of German Expressionism owe a great deal to Symbolist imagery. The virginal "good girls" seen in the films of D. W. Griffith, and the silent movie "bad girls" portrayed by Theda Bara, both show the continuing influence of Symbolist imagery, as do the Babylonian scenes from Griffith's Intolerance. Symbolist imagery lived on longest in the horror film; as late as 1932, a horror film such as Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr shows the obvious influence of Symbolist imagery; parts of the film resemble tableau vivant re-creations of the early paintings of Edvard Munch.