Essay

I have yet to have an final title for my essay but I am currently reading through books and essays to establish my final essay title, my working title is,

'How can we design for a safer future for our planet whilst living in our current capalist society.'

Bibliography

-Papnek,V (1971) 'Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change'

-Papnek,V (1995) 'The Green Imperative'

-McDonough and Braungart (2002) 'Cradle to Cradle'

-Dobson,A (1991) 'Green Political Thought'

-Rodgers,H (2010) 'Green Gone Wrong'

-Orr,D 'The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture and Human Intention'

Task 2- Benjamin & Mechanical Reproduction

Read the Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. Write a 300 word analysis of one work of Graphic Design, that you think relates to the themes of the text, and employing quotes, concepts and terminology from the text.

The essay can be found online here.http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

As Benjamin says 'in principle a work of art has always been reproducible' and people have been reproducing artwork for years. A good example of this can been seen in the 'Keep Calm and Carry on' posters, but these reproductions seem to mock the originals, wich were used during war time, and devalued their meaning,and 'thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public.'

Reproductions question the authenticity of the original but can also be a good thing as it makes a it more widely available to people who would maybe not know about or get to see the original. However as more productions are being made the aura around the original shrivels, as Benjamin says 'the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning.'

However all these arguments against reproduction and how it devalues the original seem to be surrounding the works of fine art, is it ment to be inaccessible is that what the artists are aiming for, where as within graphic design is the work more open to questioning and challenge and made to be accessible to the masses, like the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' posters.

Benjamin states two ways work gains it value 'the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work', so if we remove the artwork from its place in a gallery by reproducing it and putting it on our wall, are we to say that it loses its value, should the Mona Lisa only be seen in the Louvre? If reproductions exist surely this opens up the artwork to a much wider audience who may never get to go to Paris to see the original. If not this woud create a hierarchy within the art world, like a facist state, where only the rich make the artwork and only the rich can view it, which frankly is not right.

Lecture 5-The Gaze and The Media

Seminar 2

 In this seminar we looked at the lecture we had a few weeks before, 'Technology will Liberate us', we took Walter Benjamin's essay an analysed it. We took sections in groups and tried to work out what he was talkign about and feedback to the rest of the group, I looked at the first 2 sections, notes can been seen on the essay above.

Lecture 4-Critical Positions of the Media and Popular Culture

In developing Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations, Marx identified civil society as the economic base and political society as the political superstructure.^[1] Marx postulated the essentials of the base–superstructure concept in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):

“

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter Into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and politicalsuperstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole, immense, superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.[2]

”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure

Lecture 3-Marxism and Activism

Aims

-To introduce a critical definition of ideology

-To introduce some of the basic principles of Marxist philosophy

-To explain the extent to which the media constitutes us as a subject

-To introduce 'cultural jamming' and the idea of design activism.

'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, it to change it.'

Marx, K (1845) 'Theses On Feuerbach'

Marxism is:

A political manifesto-he wrote the communist manifesto-leading to socialism, Communism and the twentieth century conflicts between capital and labour

He also wrote about aspects of society-Marxism is a philosophical method

A philosophical approach to the social sciences-human behaviour

What is Capitalism?

-Control of the means of production in private hands

-A market where labour power is bought and sold

-Production of commodities for sale

-Use of money as a means of exchange

-Competition/meritocracy

-Its the society we live in today in the western world.

-Its a competition that makes us compete

-Comes from the start of life, told to compete against others at school for grades, told to compete in the work market

Communist Evolution

1.Primitive Communism: as seen in the cooperative tribal societies.

2.Slave society: develops when the tribe becomes a city-state.Birth of aristocracy.

3.Feudalism: aristocracy becomes the ruling class. Merchants develop into capitalists.

4.Capitalism: (what we are in now) capitalists are the ruling class, who create and employ the real working class.

5.Socialism-workers gain class consciousness,overthrow the capitalists and take control over the state

6.communism:a classless and stateless society.

Marx's Concept of Base/Superstructure

 (Marx is a materialist philosopher)

Base

Forces of production-materials,tools,workers,skills etc

relations of production-employer/employee, class, master/slave etc

Superstructure

social institutions-legal, political, cultural

forms of consciousness-ideology

'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles'

(Marx, Communist Manifesto)

Base------>determines content and form of-------->Superstructure------>Reflects form of and legitimises------->Base

Where we are in life we are forced into situations and relations that we don't really have a choice about, even though we like to think that we do. If you are born in a poor, deprived area of the country you will have a different life from someone born in a richer more well off area.

The State

-'...but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie'(Marxs and Engels)

-Instruments of the state

Ideological and Physical concern

-The Bourgeoisie

-The Proletariat

Ideology

1. system of ideas and beliefs (eg beliefs of a politicla party)

2. masking, distortion, or selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations, through creation of 'false consciousness'

'[ The ruling class has ] to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, ... to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.'

Karl Marx, (1846) The German Ideology, 

'Religion is the opiate of the Masses'

Art as Idelogy-Artist used to come from people who were educated, so only rich people produced art and only men were allowed to make art, white rich men are making the art.

Kings and Queens buy the art and dictate what gets painted. Rich people are making art for other rich people.

-Guerrilla Girls

Society=Economical, Political and Ideology

Ideology is a practice through which men and women 'live' their relations to real conditions of existence.

Ideology offers false, but seemingly true resolutions to social imbalance.

Althusser, (1970) 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses'

The Media as Ideological State Apparatus

-A means of production

-Disseminates the view of the ruling class (dominant hegemonic)

-Media creates false consciousness

-The individual is produced by nature; the subjects by culture. (Fiske, 1992)

-The constitution of the subject

-Interpolation

The way ideology works- for example in newspaper- it becomes more than propgagnda it becomes a way of life.

-Discursive Codes

-Ideological assumptions

-Myth

-Orality

 The newspapers also set judgement on people, they make assumptions and project them onto people.

Marx-Ideology

'Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most of the relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.'

Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972

 -Patriarchal ideology

-Commodity Fetishism

-We can almost comodify or brand anything,

-These are sold for $100 each, making nothing into a commodity.

-The assets of the worlds top three billionaries are greater then those of the poorest 600 milllion on the planet. 

-More than a third of the worlds population (2.8 billion)live on less than two dollars a day. 

-1.2 billion live on less than one dollar a day 

-In 2002 34.6 million Americans lived below the official poverty line (8.5 million of those had jobs!) Black American Poverty double that of whites 

-Per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa =$490 

-Per capita subsidy for European cows = $913

‘I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old.’ (Kinnock 1983)

Seminar 1

Lecture 2-Technology Will Liberate Us

 

http://www.egs.edu/library/walter-benjamin/biography/

'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is arguably the most influential of Benjamin's essays, in which he locates a shift in the status of traditional art as technical means of reproduction such as photography and film begin to dominate the imagination of a mass public. Benjamin defines the characteristic of manual production of the traditional artwork as a historical process unique to the original object, manifest in the object as its "aura." The subsequent proliferations of technical reproductions of a traditional artwork bear only an imagistic similitude to the original, lacking the "aura" and therefore any relation to the actual historical dimension thereof. The gradual preference of technical media by the mass public signifies for Benjamin both a radical shift in the arts to the political in the Marxist sense, although this shift in the status of art to the political also allows aesthetic contemplation to become dissociated from the properly lived experience of the autonomous individual.'


I have found a summary on Benjamins essay on The work of Art in the Age Mechanical Reproduction on The Frankfurt School website,
http://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/summary-the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction/

Task 1- Panopticism

Choose an example of one aspect of contemporary culture that is, in your opinion, panoptic. Write an explanation of this, in approximately 200-300 words, employing key Foucauldian language, such as 'Docile Bodies' or 'self-regulation, and using not less than 5 quotes from the text 'Panopticism' in Thomas, J. (2000) 'Reading Images', NY, Palgrave McMillan.


In our society, the examination hall or room that children are to sit their school exams can be seen as a panoptic. It is environment where everyone is separate, all looking the same way, with no communication, be no physical restrictions to stop them from moving or talking. However an examiner is always watching them, 'this surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration' (Foucault, 1977), this permanent registration is what makes panopticon work.
The sense of power that the examiner seems to hold over the students makes the students become 'docile bodies', the panoptic system with the idea that they are constantly being watched and monitored makes the students 'self monitoring' and 'self correcting'. A panopticon 'automatizes and disindividualizes power',(Foucault,1977) meaning that it works without anyone exercising power, in an exam room the examiner does not have to exercise their authority, just there presences in the room makes the students behave and obey, the 'panopticon is a machine.' (Foucault, 1977)
The layout of the exam room is modeled on the Panopticon, ensuring that each person can be seen by the examiner but the students are unsure if they are individually being watched at any one time, making the examiners power in the exam room over the students 'visible and unverifiable.' (Foucault, 1977)
Foucault uses the panopticon as an analogy for control, this control can be translated into modern culture such as an examination room as well as a lot of other aspects of our contemporary culture, possibly more then people realise.

Lecture 1-Panopticism

The Panopticon, designed by Bentham, 'the concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.'

Deconstruction Task

Typography just used to be about a way of communicating the spoken word, letters joined together to form words, creating a body of text. A way of visualizing language. As Lupton says in ‘Thinking with type’, ‘typography helps readers navigate the flow of content.’

Before print everything was hand-written which made each piece of text individual, with flaws and changing features from one to another. However once print was introduced things changed, print ‘helped establish the figure of the author as the owner of a text’, there becomes a sense of completion and creates a sense of authority to printed text but however closes the work off and gives it singular meaning.

Text is designed so that the reader reads in the order that they are told to follow by how the page of text has been laid out, even though they reader is made to feel as if they aren’t reading at all.

Since print typography is know normally set out in a standard format which some people claim makes it closed off and leaves no room for interpreting meaning but this said, how can we not say that each individual will read something in the same way. Features such as page numbers, index, footnotes, headings seems to make a book a set sequence of pages laid out in a way that is to be followed.

Barthe’s model of text states ‘the importance of the reader over the writer in creating meaning’, creating the ‘death of the author.’ The author is not meant to dictate the meaning of a text, ‘reading is a performance of the written word.’

In the 1980s/1990s graphic designers started to experiment with the layout and form of text, meaning that ‘typography becomes a mode of interpretation’. Each change to a piece of typography can change its meaning and context, where as some words insist on meaning a change of typeface or typographic act such as the leading could change the content and read a different meaning.

Marinetti

 

This piece of typographic work is by Marinetti, this text shows the use of deconstruction within typography. The format and layout of the type creates a disjointed text that puts the reader in control, the abstract layout means each reader can inturprate the text in their own way, starting and ending at any point, creating paths within the text. It creates a sense of exspression and movement throughout the text

 

‘Advertising doesn’t sell things; all advertising does it change the way people think or feel’ (Jeremy Bullmore). Evaluate this statement with reference to selected critical theories (past and present)

Advertising is a social force; it is constantly surrounding us, twenty five million new print advertisements are produced a year in Britain alone. Consumers are continually subjected to promises of ideals and glamour thorough advertisements, making them believe they are missing out in life because they don’t own certain products. Advertising changes the way we think about ourselves, the ideal of ones self seems to have become you are what you own, as Berger says, ‘the envy of others’ fuels consumers to think they need products to improve themselves to be socially accepted. Consumers are made to think they need products to obtain the attributes associated with the product, but this is just a fake desire that changes and manipulates how people feel towards life. Advertisements, states Berger, fill our heads ‘with glamorous day dreams.’

Berger writes, ‘the anxiety on which publicity plays is the fear that having nothing you will be nothing’, this is the advertising world giving people false thoughts and making them crave the glamour that is being portrayed in adverts, and if this isn’t obtained they are insignificant. This idea of a glamorous lifestyle can be seen in many adverts but perfume adverts in particular use this ideal glamour to sell their products. This can be seen in the Dior advert for their ‘J’adore’ perfume with the famous actress Charlize Theron as the model. The way the advert is showing the perfume is that it is the only thing you need, as the model strips herself of all her jewelry and clothing, and quoting ‘a limousine is a car’, ‘gold is cold’, creating the feeling that all she wants and needs is the perfume. If the glamorous model has the perfume then the consumer will think that if they have it they could have the lifestyle to go with it. As Berger says, ‘with this you will become desirable’, people will want you and envy you, like people want and envy the model in adverts.

                             ‘J’adore Dior’ advertising campaign, 2007

The model in advertisements is often put in the position of a goddess usually portraying this idea of glamorous lifestyle. Again in the Dior advert the way the model is filmed is from a low angle looking up at her to create a sense of authority and power over the viewer. The viewer sees the model as this goddess like creature and makes the consumer feel that this status can be achieved if they own the product, ‘it offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell’, Berger. The model as a goddess can also be seen in the Jean Paul Gautier adverts, there is a male and female version of the advert, appealing to both genders and therefore a wider market. "One of the signature strengths of the advertising industry lies in its ability to transform seemingly mundane objects into highly desirable products," as was suggested by author Debra (Trampe University of Groningen). This is how using the model as the goddess helps sell everyday products and makes the consumer think all they are missing to be like these models is this product.

 

‘Classique’, Jean Paul Gaultier advertising campaign, Jean Baptiste Mondino, 2009

‘The power of any object to attract our attention depends on the intensity of the sensation aroused’, claims Walter Dill Scott in ‘The Theory of Advertising: A Simple Exposition of the Principles of Psychology’, the Jean Paul Gaultier adverts conform to this theory. The models in the adverts are shown in and idealised, sexualised way, representing the idea of perfection making the consumer desire to want the model and to become the model themselves, projecting the feeling and need of glamour. Burger states that ‘to be able to buy something is the same thing as being sexually desirable’, highlighting the connection with the sexualised images and glamour that is present in perfume adverts.

The commodity self is the idea that we become the products that we buy, Floyd Allport quotes, "Our consciousness of ourselves is largely a reflection of the consciousness which others have of us... my idea of myself is rather my own idea of my neighbor's view of me." The advertising industry uses the idea of the commodity self to make the consumers believe that if they have these products they will become better, happier people, they sell the products on the virtues it will supposedly bring. Karl Marx writes, ‘the product becomes a commodity…it is exchanged for a symbol which represents it as exchange value.’ The consumer is made to feel like they are incomplete, like their life is lacking, it has gone so far that owning a certain product doesn’t just improve ones self it becomes ones self, you are what you own and the adverts ‘offer him an improved alternative to what he is’ states Berger.

Another advert that evokes the feelings of envy through the use of glamour is Calvin Klein ‘Escape’ advertisement. The name itself has connotations with a better life, the escapism form the consumer’s current life into a new alluring life that they are made to think that they want and that they believe they will become. These adverts alters peoples values, wants, beliefs and actions to make them think in a different way, make them think that they need something they don’t to improve their lives. Along with the consumers idea of themselves there is the social aspect, how we feel in social surroundings around others and how we think others see us. The consumer wants to project a certain self-image to others; Burger states ‘the anxiety on which publicity plays is the fear that having nothing you will be nothing’. The commodity self becomes important, it becomes a ‘harmful social force’ says Berger, becoming about popularity between people, ‘the state of being envied is what constitutes glamour’. Advertisements make the consumer believe if they own these products their self esteem and confidence will increase, however a product itself cannot produce this it is the fabricated ideal that the adverts evoke onto the consumer making them believe they can gain something from the products, Karl Marx calls this commodity fetishism.  

                      

                                   ‘Escape’, Calvin Klein, 1993

Karl Marx talks about commodity fetishism, he claims that in the capitalist society we only approach products "through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products", not to the values that it is used for, which is what Marx states is the simple commodity, not what you supposedly gain from it. He believes that people in a capitalist society treat commodities as if there are values attached to the product that is gained from purchasing it, like the glamour that is evoked in the perfume adverts. People in a capitalist society use the commodities that they have to create a material lifestyle, using their labor to make money which they then use to buy commodities that they think will elevate themselves, that they think have certain values attached to them, which is a fabricated idea. He believes that people think the material objects they own define them, he says people forget ‘secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities that is labor’, its not the supposed values that the products have it’s what they can be used for which makes them what they are.

In conclusion the way the advertising world manipulates us into thinking that our lives are incomplete, ‘it proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, our lives by buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer-even though we will be poorer by having spent our money’, states Berger. This is how they change the way the consumer thinks, it makes us feel something that is not true, a fabricated ideal which isn’t obtained. As Burger says ‘the entire world becomes a setting for the fulfillment of publicity’s promise of the good life’, and we cannot escape it, our thoughts and ideas will constantly be challenged and manipulated by advertisements.