Week 3: More on the Spectacle/ Culture Jamming (or, waging communication guerilla warfare)

                                                                                                       8.31.10

Topics:                                         

• Reflections on Punk/Consumerism/ Ideology

9.210

Topics:

• Re-interpreting mediated spectacles

Week 2: The Role of the Critic/ Writing Critcal Essays & The Hacienda Must Be Built-Origins of Punk Ideology

Tuesday 8.24.2010

 Topics Discussed:

• The role of the critic, why study popular culture? 
• Writing critical essays, expectations, form, etc.
• Assign artifact selection (re-assigned)

High Culture vs Pop Culture

3 Theories
Mass Culture : "Idiocracy"
Industrial Culture: Disney Empire
Progressive Evolution: Blurs lines between high & low culture.


 Criticism as a process

Thursday 8.26.2010

Topics Discussed:

• Media Ideology
• The Situationist, consumerism, media and culture
• Unpacking Debord

 "A society’s “culture” both reflects and prefigures its possible ways of organizing life. Our era is characterized by the lagging of revolutionary political action behind the development of modern possibilities of production which call for a superior organization of the world."

"The shattering of modern culture is the result, on the plane of ideological struggle, of the chaotic crisis of these antagonisms."

"The error that is at the root of surrealism is the idea of the infinite richness of the unconscious imagination."

"The form (and even some aspects of the content) of this Socialist Realism is not very different from the traditional propaganda of religious organizations, particularly of Catholicism. By means of an invariable propaganda, Catholicism defends a unitary ideological structure that it alone, among all the forces of the past, still possesses. But at the same time, in a parallel operation designed to recapture the increasingly numerous sectors that are escaping its influence, the Catholic Church is attempting to take over modern cultural forms, particularly those representing complicated theoretical nullity (“spontaneous” painting, for example). The Catholic reactionaries have the advantage over other bourgeois tendencies of being able to rely on a permanent hierarchy of values; this inalterable foundation enables them all the more freely to push decomposition to the extreme in whatever discipline they engage in."

"Lettrism, in France, had started off by totally opposing the entire known aesthetic movement, whose continual decaying it correctly analyzed. Striving for the uninterrupted creation of new forms in all domains, the Lettrist group carried on a salutary agitation between 1946 and 1952. But the group generally took it for granted that aesthetic disciplines should take a new departure within a general framework similar to the former one, and this idealist error limited its productions to a few paltry experiments. In 1952 the Lettrist left wing organized itself into a “Lettrist International” and expelled the backward fraction. In the Lettrist International the quest for new methods of intervention in everyday life was pursued amidst sharp struggles among different tendencies."

"In Italy — with the exception of the antifunctionalist experimental group that in 1955 formed the most solid section of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus — the efforts toward avant-garde formations have remained attached to the old artistic perspectives and have not even succeeded in expressing themselves theoretically."

  

-"Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Condition of Organization and Action" 

                                                                    -Guy Debord, 1957

Week 1: Course Introduction

Thursday 8.19.10


Topics Discussed:

• Course Introduction                            
• Review of Syllabus
• Class Procedures & Assignments
• Media Blog Assignment

                                                         " Okay, I won't say it in front of little baby ears here; but you should get schmortion at the schmortion clinic" - Knocked Up (2007)

First class was a simple discussion and overview of what topics we would be embarking on during this fall semester. We began class with basic introductions with a twist by delivering a line from a movie. After Scott's quick overview of modern mediums and artifacts in our growing society; I'm assuming these simple movie quotes were not just for the simple shi*s and giggles of attempting to remember names. I'm excited about delving into this very bizarre topic of punk-cyberspace.