Task Three

Essay Proposal:

Title: Does the media shape the role of women?

- Social pressures leading to self-fulfilling prophecy - skinny celebrities -eating disorders - size zero (Nicole Richie).

- Beauty adverts - pressuring women to buy their products to keep youthful looks etc.

- Nuts and Zoo magazines show scantily clad women with surgically enhanced breasts - women believe this is how they should look to find and keep a man happy (Lucy Pinder).

- Contradicting point of women's magazines/books promoting the independent woman lifestyle - not needing a man to be happy.

Images that could support the essay:

Texts to support the essay:

Naomi Klein - The Beauty Myth - How Images Of Beauty Are Used Against Women
'During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty...'

Lecture 5... Reality, Virtuality & Hyperreality

- Haddon Sundblom illustrations from the 1930s: Coca-Cola shaped Santa Claus, which has become the icon of Christmas.

- People only taste the branding of Coca-Cola – proven in blind taste test, between Pepsi and Coca Cola, no matter which drink was in the glass, if it had the Coca Cola label on, people preferred it.

- Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007) French philosopher, cultural theorist; associated with post-structuralism.

- Post-structuralist thinkers: Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous

- Structuralist thinkers: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser

- Other precursors: Karl Marx (Marxism), Guy Debord, Marcel Mauss

- Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle (1987) - revised Marx’s main concepts to analyse commodity-relations in the age of consumer culture.

- Marx: Pioneering philosopher, ‘critique of political economy’

- Baudrillard : Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

- Simulacra: simulacra are copies either of the thing they are intended to represent or stand in for or - in recent history - are merely copies of other copies.

- The Holy Sacrament: ‘reflection of a profound reality’ - Gargoyle as an example of ‘maleficence’ - ‘masks and denatures a profound reality’

- Malficent, from Sleeping Beauty – ‘has no relation to any reality whatsoever, it is its own pure simulacrum’

- Hence: Coke or Santa aren’t ‘real’ in the sense of ‘profound reality’, because they are ‘pure simulacra’ (copies of copies that do not refer to a pre-existing reality).

- Christkindl Market in Leeds: festive example of simulation.

- Charlie Brooker video – Reality TV Editing: TV isn’t real, it’s hyperreal.

- Baudrillard - Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) -three orders of simulacra

1. Counterfeit - dominant scheme - ‘classical period’

2. Production - dominant schema - industrial era

3. Simulation - dominant schema - current code-governed phase

- September 11 – Before it happened – game on web where player defends the twin towers.

Task Three

Initial thoughts for the dissertation...

Topics of interest:
- Film Theory and the Gaze

- Hyperreality

- Panopticon and Surveillance

Lecture 4... Communication Theory

Laswell's maxim: Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect.



Information or Cybernetic Theory of Communication



- Shannon and Weaver Bell Laboraties (1949)

Evaluation of model:
+ Good for researching how effectively your work communicates, as a designer.
- Linear process, not concerned with meaning which is a socially mediated process.

This model can be used to show effective communication by replacing each step with:
- Info. source with Client.
- Transmitter with Designer.
- Receiver with Media Outlet.
- Destination with Target Audience.

Three levels of potential communciation problems

Level 1: Techinical
- Accuracy
- Systems of encoding/decoding
- Compatibility of systems/ need for specialist knowledge.

Level 2: Semantic
- Precision of language.
- How much of the message can be lost without meaning being lost?
- What language to use?

Level 3: Effectiveness
- Does the message affect behaviour the way we want it to?
- What can be done if the required effect fails to happen?

- Japanese bikes (Honda): used communicative methods with consumers to improve bikes.

Systems Theory

+ Can switch between mathematical, biological, psychological and sociological frames of reference.

BARB (Broadcasters' Audience Research Board)

- Categories - men, women , children, categories, housewives.
- Further divided in to social class and age.
- Social class is determined by the household, rather than the individual.

Class:
AB - Higher (A) Middle Management, Administrative, or Professional (B)
C1 - Supervisory, Clerical and Junior Management.
C2 - Skilled manual workers.
DE- Semi-skilled and unskilled workers and non wage earners.

* The top two categories are sometimes classes as 'upmarket' and the latter as downmarket.

Semiotics

- Semantics: addresses what a sign stands for.

- Syntactics: relationships among signs.

- Pragmatics: studies practical use.

Semiosphere

- Semiotics examines signs as if they are part of a language.
- Problem: semiotics in clothes portrays a message, however may have just woke up and shoved something on.
- Levi Strauss - ethnography - myth, kinship rules.
- Lacan - unconscious; psychology 'language is first of all, a foreign one'.

- Trainers - bought to send signs 'money and coolness' - how object (material) used in contemporary society to create cultural value.

- Advertising uses semiotics 'buy this and it will do this for you'.

- Panzini - great e.g. of semiotics. -Codes: linguistics and image.

- Works for visual language too e.g. signs.
Danger (Red Triangle) + Plane = Airport Sign
[Danger to alert those in the proximity in which the incoming aircraft fly at a very low altitude over a road]

Phenomenological Tradition

- Process of knowing through direct experience. It is the way in which we understand the world.
- Phenomenon - refers to appearance of an object or condition in one's perception.
- A failure in communication can be seen as an absence of, or failure in human relationships.
- Phenomology reacts to the 'Embodied Mind'.
- Communication seen as an extension of the nervous system starts with an awareness of the body.
- Face recognition - based on life experience.
- Process of interpretation is central.
- Unlike semiotics, where interpretation is separate from reality, in the phenomenological tradition - interested in what is real for the person.

Task Two

Adorno’s attitude to popular music is quite condescending, and at times quite humorous. ‘This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.’, here Adorno is referring to the standardisation of popular music, he writes, ‘…popular music is standardised, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardisation’, a lot of today’s songs can advocate this, structurally the song is the same, but there may be a section in the middle which is completely different, before returning to the standard formula of the song.

Later on in the essay, he writes how this structural standardisation leads to a typical, pre-determined response from the listener, which is completely diverse to the ideal of existing in a free, liberal society. This suggests the listeners are completely docile, and in this state ‘…popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes.’ It is almost suggesting the music conditions and trains the listeners to react in a certain way, like soldiers in their training. Adorno states that the music is pre-digested, like the Reader’s Digest, a collection of condensed and sometimes re-written articles.

Another reason there is this standardisation, and similarity among the popular songs, is due to imitation. Adorno claims that when one song has been a huge success, many other songs, imitate the formula that song is based on in an attempt to create that same success.

The next key point in the essay is pseudo-individualisation, this is a false consciousness that popular music songs create as the listener believes they are being individual. It’s in this process that the docility of the listeners leads them to overlook that what they are listening to has been pre-digested.

Adorno then goes to explain how popular music has a hold on the masses, by stating that the listeners only use this music as a distraction from everyday life of the working class as it is a form of entertainment, and entertainment does not require attention, or concentration. The patterned and pre-digested formula the songs feature, can induce relaxation on a class of people fed up with fears and anxieties of life such as; war, unemployment and loss of income.

A video that I feel represents some of these points is Cheryl Cole's Fight For This Love... My 8 year old cousin claims to love this song... Does he just like the fact he can dance to it and nod his head like everyone else, because I am pretty sure he doesn't understand the meaning of the song.

Embedding disabled.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMiy_UsrPDs&feature=channel

Seminar 2... Lecture Discussion and Task Preparation

Lecture Discussion

- Base
- Superstructure
- Materialism - in philosophical sense where all things in society.
- (Base) Forces of production: materials, tools, workers, people, skills, technology - parts of scoiety; from these there are relations of production: master/slave, employer/employee - you either control these forces or are controlled by them.
- (Superstructure) Forms of consciousness religion, politics, culture, state, law.
- Ideas in politics - born out of societies' antagonisms.
- Base/structure relationship - base reconditions superstructures which gives base strength: 'dialetic' e.g. base (forces of production) - men are dominant class - statistically proven. Women - weaker, objectified - which almost reinforces how men should dominate.
- Praxis - unification of theory in relation to the world.
- Culture emerges from base so ideas of culture are ideological.
- Ideology - system of ideas - false consciousness (seem to be true but disguise or mask the real nature).
- Idea of gender: women are the asethetic sex (idea, historically constructed) - women are made to be aesthetic due to their lower/weaker position in society.
- Popular culture vs Culture (Taste: Gatekeeper - ideological - created by ruling class - 'mass culture is bad, high culture is good' - protecting their own classes.
- To have taste - must be taken from elite.
- People from council estates don't have facilities to form taste.
- Bordieu - Cultural Capital.
- Culture is possessed by the ruling class, in the pursuuit of culture you can moce upwards.
- Education now gives you cultural capital - not about development of individual - gain a 'badge' or letters which opens doors.
- Arnoldism - 'Anarchy'.
- Leavisism.
- Frankfurt School - important Marxist thinkers. Nazi's closed down the school - focussed on popular culture - most interesting project, why working class people were involved in systems that were against them.
- 'All mass culture is identical' - like car production in a line - formulaic.
- Authentic culture works on a different levels, it makes you think about it in a real way.
- Dick Hebdige - 'Youth cultural styles begin by using symbolic challenges, but they must end by establishing new conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries or rejuvenating old ones'.

Task

- Read Adorno and summarise the essay.
- Post a link to a Youtube pop video that epitomises Adorno's sentiments.

Lecture 3... The Gaze

Call of Duty

- 1st person player clip
- 'intense, life-like'
- 'enables me to think I'm in the game'

- 3rd person player clip
'more cinematic like an interactive movie'
'it's harder to control other people in the third - that's why I like it'

(Different perspectives)

-What motivates us to hurt?
- What motivates us to watch it?
- Can control engagement with death and violence - maximum or minimum.
- Choice is down to player.

- Psychoanalysis: analysis of options and choices we make.

Aims

- Look at ideas about the power of looking through psychoanalysis.
- Consider: scopophilia, suture, intra/extra-diagetic and narcissim.
- Introduce film theory and feminist psychoanalysis.
- Key thinkers/authors: Freud, Mulvey (Women as sex objects), Jacques Lacan and Kaja Silverman.

Different perspectives

- First lecture looked at the power of the gaze through 'discourse analysis' - how knowledge is formed. And focussed on institutional structures.

- This lecture looks at the gaze through psychoanalysis. This will focus on psychical, interpersonal and sexual relations.

Misconceptions

- Mishmash of psychology (behaviour) and psychiatry (mental illness).

Linked to both that can be applied to all aspects of society, art and design.

-It's all about sex.

It does focus on the role of sexuality, particularly at infancy but is also about how we look at other objects, and our behaviour towards them.

Laura Mulvey 'Visual and Other Pleasures'

- Hollywood films - sexist - gaze is represented as male and powerful.
- Plot of film, male driven.
- Women are seen as sex objects.


-Scopophilia

- Pleasure of looking at others' bodies as objects.
- Instinctual desire to look - this emerges in childhood.
- Extreme scopophilia - can lead to voyeurism in which the person's only sexual gratification comes from being a peeping tom.
- Narcissistic identification: (Mulvey) spectators identify with male hero.


Jacques Lacan - Mirror Stage

- Projected notion of ideal ego in image reflected.
- Child's own body - less perfect.
- Films can produce a fascination in image - lead to loss of ego.
- Comic book guy's narcissistic identification with film hero and comic book only highlight loss of ego.

Contradiction in two pleasurable structures...


1. scopophilia - sexual stimulation by sight (objectifying actors on screen).
2. narcissistic identification - with image seen.

- Cinema thrives on contradiction.
- Product of patriarchal realities.

Women as image/ Men as bearer of look

- Passive female, active male.
- Male gaze projects fantasy on to female figure.
-'male figure cnanot bear the burden of sexual objectification'
- 'By means of identification with him (male actor e.g. Brad Pitt), through participation in his power the spectator can indirectly possess her (female actress e.g. Angelina Jolie) too.

Suture (extending Mulvey's theory)

- Spectators look through eyes of the actors in the film.
- Follow gaze - without guilt.
- Can be broken - actor speaks to us.
- When broken - audience aware of gaze.
- Possibility of audience feeling guilty.
- This gaze invites audience to be part of scene.

Spectator's gaze

- Gaze of viewer at an image.
- Most common form of gaze.
e.g. Us viewing Toby (lecturer).
- We are also viewing others in audience, this is...

Intra-diagetic gaze

- Gaze of one depicted person at another within an image.
e.g. Toby sees us looking at him and looking at others

Degas: Le Vial (The Rape)

Cropped image above.

Full image.
Gaze: Intra-diagetic
- It is the character that gazes at the subject (girl).
- This exhibits the power of the gaze, we don't obtain it but recognise the power.
- Defers guilt.

Dolce and Gabbana Advert
Gaze: Intra-diagetic
- No guilt, we are not perpetrators.
- Possibility of narcissistic identification.

Edouard Manet: A Bar at the Folies Bergère
Gaze: Extra Diagetic
- Invited to be viewed as the artist.

Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (1946-1966) Mixed media.

- Go up to door look through hole.

- Translation: being given.

- Being given what? The gaze? Permission?

- Contemporary computer games use different forms of the gaze.

- Hitman pick, intra-diagetic or suture.

- Suture forces empathy, between player and protagonist.

- This is broken when we are rmeinded that the gaze is constructed.

Conclusion

- Different forms of the gaze evoke different structures of power.

- We can objectify (scopophilia) and identify (narcissistic identification).

- Visual culture employs different gazes to evoke structures of patriarchy.